


We'll Cast Some Light

by w_anderingheart



Category: EXO (Band), K-pop
Genre: Angst, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 14:44:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4750184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/w_anderingheart/pseuds/w_anderingheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is where they begin: Kyungsoo sifts through memories he doesn’t have, and Jongin helps him find the details.<br/>(This is not, in fact, where it begins.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> the following warnings are simply precautions. keep in mind this story is not nearly as heavy as it might appear to be, but please be aware of potentially triggering material.
> 
> WARNINGS: hanahaki disease (fictional terminal illness, depictions that may resemble bullimia), mature themes (i.e. swearing, sexual situations, what may be interpreted as depression/nihilism though not explicit, strong themes of death/allusions to death), slightly internalized homophobia (very slight, implied and not explicit), off-screen death of a minor character. **no one from the main pairing dies.**
> 
> extra warning: the story telling jumps around A LOT. the time range is late 2012 to mid 2017. (consider "present day" as 2015 onwards. prior to 2015, kyungsoo is healthy)
> 
> music playlist for this fic! [(click)](http://xehuntea.tumblr.com/post/128803437338/title-well-cast-some-light-kaisoo-read-lj)

// June 2017. boseong.

“The cure is to forget.”

Jongin snaps his head up.

Those lips. They move again.

“Are you  _okay_?” Eyes wide, muted concern hidden just beneath the surface. Jongin doesn’t know the answer to that question. He wishes people would stop asking him.

The tea house is empty at the moment, but soon, the tour groups will be passing by. He pinches the seam of his denim, grabbing a bit of his skin as he does. He grimaces.

Kyungsoo has tucked his legs back underneath the table, as if afraid their knees might brush. His concerned eyes haven’t moved.

“Why are you here?” he asks hesitantly. His face looks full and healthy.

 _The cure is to forget._  Jongin inhales deeply, breathing in the summer sunlight pouring through the shop windows. Memory is a curious thing, he realizes. Really, Kyungsoo hasn’t truly forgotten anything at all. He’s simply remembered the same things differently.

“Don’t let me wilt,” Jongin says. In the sky, a cloud shifts. The sunlight disappears. “Remember?”

Kyungsoo blinks away, staring outside. The green tea fields are visible from where they sit. Jongin waits for a reply, and doesn’t get one. But when Kyungsoo looks back, he’s neither smiling nor frowning.

He pushes the hair out from his forehead. Jongin reaches for his camera, snaps the picture, and Kyungsoo stares at him, eyes swimming.

Their story, Jongin likes to think, begins here, at the end.

 

-

 

// 2015. seoul.

Do Kyungsoo starts dying on the sort of day that feels like it shouldn’t exist. It is winter and it is sleeting, and here, there are never storms like that. The wind whistles through the snow. He watches what he can of the mess through the open spaces of his window shutters.

He is sitting on the floor, legs-crossed, with a single lighted candle on the coffee table. Perched on his lap is his dusty notebook, thin, lined pages. They’re flimsy, the edges keep folding back, but the storm has killed the electricity, so he is left with no other choice. He fidgets with its dented corners, other hand tapping a pencil against his knee.

Sirens start to wail. The sound reaches through his apartment walls and settles into the darkness. Kyungsoo squints his eyes. The candle flame sways back and forth violently for a second, before it evens out again. There isn’t nearly enough light for him to be working, but the deadline for his next draft is in three weeks and Junmyeon might not let it slide if he comes up empty-handed one more time. He brings the candle closer towards him.

When he looks back up into the windows, he searches for the moon. But tonight, the clouds are too heavy to yield even the slightest nighttime glow.

And then, somewhere between the shadows of his dark apartment, the feeling of phantom hands grasp at his insides and squeeze his lungs. His heart constricts in his chest, throat going as dry as sandpaper, itching like a bug bite. He claws at his neck in haste, dragging nails down his skin. The tension piles up as sure and dry as sand trailing through an hourglass.

When he coughs into his hand, his palm comes back red and pink—blood-stained azalea petals tumbling like graceful ballerinas from his mouth, onto the blank pages of his notebook.

 

-

 

Junmyeon drums his fingers evenly on his expensive wood desk. The rhythm matches the headache in Kyungsoo’s head. Kyungsoo presses his lips together, touches two digits to his left temple, and tries not to look irritated.

“I like it.” Junmyeon smiles at him, straight white teeth gleaming. Kyungsoo blinks. “It seems much more… morbid, though. Than your last book.” Junmyeon keeps his smile up, maybe to soften the criticism. Kyungsoo has always found him too nice for his own good.

“Oh, Junmyeon-hyung. What a soft heart you have.” It’s teasing, though Kyungsoo’s face is blank as he says it. Junmyeon chuckles. He tends to find the blandness of Kyungsoo’s humour amusing. It’s hard to tell when Kyungsoo is joking, but instead of being turned off by it, Junmyeon finds a certain fun in trying to distinguish the minute changes in Kyungsoo’s impassive expressions.

Sunlight shifts outside, streaming through the undrawn window. Kyungsoo catches the red tint in Junmyeon’s hair.

“Nicer weather than the last few weeks,” murmurs Kyungsoo. He grazes a casual finger along the bump of his Adam’s apple.

Junmyeon is watching him. Kyungsoo drops his hand then, as Junmyeon folds the sleeves up on his soft blue dress shirt. The muscles in his forearm move as he grabs a stack of paperwork off his shelf. Kyungsoo looks away. “Well, I will say I’m quite attached to your characters,” Junmyeon offers, clicking a pen on the wood of his desk. He smiles, placid. “Please don’t kill anyone off.”

Kyungsoo hums. “I’m not promising anything.”

Junmyeon opens his mouth to speak, but a cough rises up from Kyungsoo’s throat, hard and sudden. His hand flies up to cover his mouth, trying to breathe. He catches the petals before Junmyeon can see, scrunching their soft, leathery exterior in his palm.

“You’ve been coughing a lot lately,” Junmyeon’s groomed eyebrows furrow. “On the phone too. You should really rest if you’re sick.”

Sick. The word rolls around in Kyungsoo’s head, like the snow storm that one night. Kyungsoo squeezes the petals, pink stained red from his blood. He feels the blood seep into his skin. It’s smooth. He squeezes them harder. There is a sadistic, haunting magnificence in their colour—in the way their beauty feels so destructive. Painful and all-consuming.

“No, I’m fine,” he says. Junmyeon smiles at him then, so Kyungsoo figures it really is all fine.

 

-

 

// 2012. new york.

The painting is an acrylic mess of red, blue and yellow swirls. Stark black lines, thick and thin, cut through the bright colours, intercepting in sharp geometric shapes. The description at the side boasts an appraising parallel to Pablo Picasso’s Cubism Period.

Underneath, the plaque reads: ARTIST – PARK CHANYEOL $5 800, and Kyungsoo snorts into his champagne glass. Five thousand dollars for a giant, square canvas that Chanyeol had splattered paint onto when he was drunk one night in Kyungsoo’s apartment.

The crowd is shifting around him, so Kyungsoo moves along the gallery and tries to feign interest in the rest of the artwork, though he knows the story behind most of Chanyeol’s pieces.

The painting at the centre of attention is one of a young lady in red frills, a large hoop skirt hiding much of her frame. It is actually Chanyeol’s girlfriend, though Kyungsoo doesn’t think anyone knows that. A corset is pulled tight at her thin waist, and although there is a tiara in her hair, she is frowning pointedly. Kyungsoo had been there for much of the painting process, watching over Chanyeol’s shoulder. This one is priced closer to ten thousand dollars, even though it is clearly just an altered rendition of Juan Carreno’s portraits of Eugenia Martinez Vallejo, the Spanish classic. Originality these days was near impossible to find.

At the refreshments, Kyungsoo swaps his empty champagne for a new one. A hand meets the small of his back as he takes a sip.

“Not even an hour in and you’re already bored,” Chanyeol hums. He grabs a cube of cheese off the food table and pops it into his mouth. “How disappointing, Kyungsoo. This is _sophisticated_ stuff.” Chanyeol’s tone dips, and he winks. They both know that Kyungsoo likes to pretend he knows less about art than he actually does.

“I’m here for the free shit,” Kyungsoo replies, lifting his glass mockingly. “You should know that by now.” It isn’t Chanyeol’s first art show, and Kyungsoo considers himself at least an all right friend so he’s attended every exhibition for as long as they’ve known each other.

Chanyeol ruffles Kyungsoo’s hair, sidestepping almost immediately because Kyungsoo is not above punching Chanyeol in the stomach. “If you didn’t like me, you wouldn’t waste time on me and you know it.”

This is true, but Kyungsoo never tells him that because he likes the way Chanyeol seems to doubt it himself.

Chanyeol is the only person Kyungsoo still talks to from NYU. It’s a strange friendship. They can go months without contact, but then, Chanyeol can send an art show ticket in the mail and Kyungsoo will hop on a plane from Seoul to New York to attend, without an RSVP.

Kyungsoo shrugs. “I had to visit my dad, anyways.”

“How is he?” Chanyeol claims a glass of champagne for himself, swirls it around carefully between his fingers. The sloshing liquid reminds Kyungsoo of the paint on Chanyeol’s five thousand dollar painting.

“I don’t know. The same, I guess. Busy.” It’s always been like this but Kyungsoo is long finished with his teenage angst phase so he’d stopped resenting his father a while ago. In the end, Kyungsoo thinks his parents’ divorce was for the best. His mother is the better parent, and Seoul is more home than New York ever was. “He started asking me about marriage, though. It was weird.”

Chanyeol laughs, half-choking on his drink. He makes a snorting noise that is extremely un-classy, and it doesn’t fit the slicked, clean-cut image he’s trying to go for tonight. “Is he going to start setting you up with some rich, young socialite lady?” He says it as if he isn’t dating the exact same type.

“I’m kind of jealous. Isn’t your dad friends with like, tons of people in the entertainment industry? You could get set up with someone famous or something,” Chanyeol says. He cocks his hip, and squares a hand on his waist, smiling. The suit he’s wearing hugs his arms as he moves, and Kyungsoo blinks, looking up to meet his amused eyes.

“I know famous people,” Kyungsoo says blandly, so Chanyeol won’t be able to tell if he’s kidding or not. The way Chanyeol smiles back at him wanly tells him he does, in fact, think Kyungsoo is kidding.

“But anyways, my dad isn’t setting me up,” Kyungsoo continues, swallowing his champagne without tasting the sweetness anymore. “Not yet, at least.”

Chanyeol throws an arm around Kyungsoo’s shoulder, the top of Kyungsoo’s head bumping against Chanyeol’s chin. “How ‘bout I set you up, then?” He pulls the glass from Kyungsoo’s fingers and steers them away from Chanyeol’s section of the exhibition.

“Uh, what are you doing?” Kyungsoo tries to elbow out of his grasp. There’s a strange aftertaste at the back of his throat that isn’t from the champagne. “Chanyeol, I don’t _actually_  want to be set up.”

Chanyeol scoffs, keeping his arm snug tightly around Kyungsoo’s neck. He navigates them through the crowds. “Dude, I’m just kidding,” he says. “No need to get your panties in a twist.”

“So where are you taking me?”

“Ah, you’ll see,” Chanyeol says, pressing his lips together. “I’ll introduce you to the star of the show.”

“I thought this was a showcase, not a competition.”

Chanyeol tips his head back and laughs so loud, it turns several heads. “It’s always a competition, Kyungsoo. Plus, Kim Jongin is tall, dark and handsome  _and_  a rising artist. The media is eating him up.”

Kyungsoo tests the name in his head. “Another Korean? I thought you were the only one.”

“Yeah, I was until this young, puppy dog showed up,” Chanyeol explains. “I mean, he really is young. Younger than us.”

That was saying something, considering Chanyeol was some sort of artistic genius. Not Kyungsoo’s words of course, but all of Chanyeol’s teachers had been smitten with Chanyeol and his paintings. Up until now, he had always been the youngest artist at these shows.

“Have you heard of  _Small World_?” asks Chanyeol. Every once in a while, someone comes up to talk to him and he waves at them good-naturedly. Kyungsoo can tell he loves the attention. Chanyeol is good with attention. Kyungsoo doesn’t like it much, himself. It’s why he writes under pen names.

“I have. Some photobook project?” Kyungsoo says. He hasn’t looked at it himself but the media is obsessed with it. “Why is it so popular?”

Chanyeol purses his lips in thought. “The photos are… very raw. Genuine. I don’t know, to be honest. I’m not a photographer.” They make a turn at the end of the hall. “But you don’t even have to be a photographer to tell how strange the shots are. Strange in a good way.” He adds that as an afterthought.

The area they’ve moved into showcases sculptures. Overhead, lights dangle on strings from the ceiling, tiny bulbs that dip down at varying lengths. It casts long shadows around the art pieces.

“I see,” says Kyungsoo, as Chanyeol pushes him past the pretty ambience and into the next area. It isn’t nearly as calm and quiet here. The lights are as white as the floor and the walls. And then Kyungsoo sees the photographs, lined up as evenly as dominoes all around them.

“Is this—“

“Yeah. Cool, isn’t it?” Chanyeol says, with a tone that’s a mix of awe and envy. He hadn’t been joking about the media craze. Reporters are clumped in a raucous herd. “This way.” He tugs Kyungsoo away from the buzz, and they skirt the perimeter.

Kyungsoo studies the photographs. They’re attractive, but unsettlingly so. He understands now what Chanyeol had meant by ‘strange.’ They depict China, that much Kyungsoo can tell, but it’s the framing and lighting that sets the viewer on edge, as if you can’t decide if you’re staring at something new nor familiar, but some mix of in between.

“ _Small World: Pieces of Beijing_ ,” Chanyeol says, pointing to the pictures. “That’s the name of this showcase.”

Chanyeol brings them to the front of the room, where a rather large team of reporters have bunched together in a loud group until someone comes along and asks them to disperse for a break.

As the crowd parts, Chanyeol walks forward and Kyungsoo follows along behind him. At the centre of the buzz, is a young man, jet-black hair pushed across his forehead. He wears a tuxedo with no bowtie, as if coming to his own party classily underdressed.

“Stealing the spotlight, as always, Kai,” Chanyeol says, with no bite. He extends his hand, and the two of them laugh. Kyungsoo wonders how many times they’ve run into each other.

The man turns his gaze sideways, curiously, and Kyungsoo tries not to think too much about the height difference. The man is about Chanyeol’s height, and Kyungsoo only goes up to Chanyeol’s chin, even with dress shoes.

“You didn’t tell me you were bringing a date, Chanyeol. What happened to your girlfriend?”

Chanyeol gives him an exasperated look, but it also seems like he’s fighting a smile. Kyungsoo’s neck goes warm. He tries to ignore it. “Ah, Nana is still here. This is my friend, Kyungsoo.”

Chanyeol props his arm on Kyungsoo’s shoulder, and Kyungsoo feels even shorter. “Kyungsoo, this is Kai. He’s the guy behind  _Small World_.”

“Kyungsoo?” Kai tilts his head at him, inquisitively. “Korean?”

“Yeah,” Kyungsoo says.

“Kyungsoo was born here and went to NYU with me,” Chanyeol interjects, “But he’s more of a Seoulite than a New Yorker.”

“You live in Seoul?” Kai asks, folding his arms over his chest. He has the top button on his dress shirt undone, and Kyungsoo tears his gaze upwards. It’s because he’s short—everything above the chin, Kyungsoo has to crane his neck to be eye-level.

“Yeah,” Kyungsoo nods. “I spend summers in Boseong-gun, though.”

“I’m from Seoul too. Born and raised there, actually.”

Kyungsoo could tell that already, though. Kai’s English is slanted just the tiniest bit; long vowels and muddled consonants.

Chanyeol’s phone beeps loudly and he curses as he fumbles for it in his pocket. “Fuck. That’s my publicist. I missed a couple interviews,” he sighs, fussing with his hair and running off. “I’ll be back!”

Kai stuffs his hands in his pockets. “Call me Jongin,” he says to Kyungsoo. “‘Kai’ is just for the Americans and Chanyeol.”

Kyungsoo shrugs. “Sure,” he says. Jongin starts walking, but he turns to look at Kyungsoo over his shoulder so Kyungsoo follows him.

“How old are you?” Jongin asks in Korean. Kyungsoo wonders if the switch is unconscious, but switches as well anyways.

“Twenty-four.”

Jongin looks over at him, and laughs a bit. “Are you serious?”

Kyungsoo frowns on instinct to harden his features. He’s aware of his baby-face. “I’m Chanyeol’s age.”

“Oh, right,” Jongin says. “I’ll call you hyung, then.” His eyes are very black when Kyungsoo meets them, but there’s mischief in his smile.

Their shoes click on the floors as they walk. Kyungsoo can tell Jongin’s are expensive leather. “Your photographs are very… interesting,” Kyungsoo offers, when they stop in front of one.

“Is that good or bad?”

The photograph they’re staring at shows a little boy, no older than four maybe. He’s crouching by the open grating of a manhole, wearing no shoes. Lamps from shops behind him light up the background. “I don’t know. Good, I guess.”

“Do you like art?” Jongin asks. They keep walking.

“I barely know anything about it,” Kyungsoo lies. He once spent hours a day reading about art history. That was back in college, though. It was a stupid side obsession.

“So you’re here just for Chanyeol?”

They stop at the next photograph. This time, of a lady in a traditional gown. She stands in the middle of the street, looking overtly elegant against the shabby backdrop. A modern princess in the slums. Her picture has been taken on an angle. Kyungsoo tilts his head to look at it. “I’m here for the champagne,” he replies.

Jongin is watching him, and Kyungsoo pretends not to notice. “What did you do at NYU?”

“English major.”

Jongin’s eyebrow quirks. Kyungsoo doesn’t know what to make of his expression. “Writer?”

“Yes,” says Kyungsoo.

“Why NYU?” Jongin crosses his arms, drumming his fingers against his bicep. He has long, long fingers and large hands. Kyungsoo’s are much smaller in comparison.

He ponders the question. “I wanted to study abroad,” he says finally.

“Writer, huh?” The upturn of Jongin’s lips gives Kyungsoo a strange feeling. “I can kind of see it.”

Kyungsoo’s eyebrows furrow. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” Jongin sighs, pursing his lips. He doesn’t have Korean features, Kyungsoo thinks. The lines of his face are too soft and his skin is a smooth brown, dark by Korean standards. When he smiles, the mischief is back. It’s subtle, like a sugar coating over a cake—almost invisible, but you just know it’s there.

“Those who can’t art, write.”

Kyungsoo lets the tension slip in, watches Jongin’s eyes glint as it does, and Kyungsoo can tell he is waiting for a reaction. Kyungsoo thinks Jongin would relish the chaos. “What did you say?” He keeps his voice calm.

“I mean that writing is the art form for untalented artists,” Jongin says. It’s impossible to read his black eyes. His smile could mean he’s teasing, but his tone is rather matter-of-fact.

Kyungsoo presses his lips in a tight line. “You have a lot of nerve, kid.”

Jongin grins. “So I’m told,” he says. He pauses then, frowning a little when Kyungsoo doesn’t say anything more. “You’re not going to fight back?”

“Fight back?” Kyungsoo scoffs, moving past Jongin as he keeps walking. “I don’t waste my time on kids. Though I do think it’s bad to have an ego that big at your age.”

Kyungsoo studies the next photograph. A group of children on a rooftop. The wind blows their hair across their faces, and blurs the clothes hanging from clotheslines around them. It makes the background a colourful, hazy mess. “You should deflate that ego before it gets too big and explodes in your face.”

Jongin sounds amused when he speaks. “What have you written?”

Kyungsoo has had several of his poems and short stories published under various pen names in various literary magazines, though he’s had less luck getting publishers to bite at his full-length works. “I’m working on a novel right now,” he replies.

“About?”

Kyungsoo sighs, blowing the hair up on his fringe. “Does it matter?” He turns to Jongin, cocking his head. “I’m untalented, after all.”

Jongin laughs. The sound is fuller and brighter than Kyungsoo expects. “I didn’t say you were an untalented  _writer_.”

“A writer isn’t an artist?” Kyungsoo counters. “You’ve got a lot to learn.”

Jongin hums, considering. “Well, tell me about your book.”

“It’s about a classical musician,” Kyungsoo humours him. “A pianist.” Jongin blinks a little at that, then smiles slowly. His long fingers are drumming along his bicep again.

“Classical piano, huh? Wouldn’t have pegged you for romantic.” He’s staring at Kyungsoo with brighter eyes; still muddled, though. Black and unreadable.

Kyungsoo runs his tongue along the seam of his lips. “Every writer is romantic. They have to be.”

“What about tragedies?”

“ _Especially_  tragedies,” Kyungsoo says.

Jongin grins again, reaching a hand into the pocket of his suit. From it, he produces a small card. Kyungsoo takes it, and reads it. A ticket.

“Stop by, if you’re still in town,” Jongin says, turning to leave as his publicist walks up to them.

“What is this?” Kyungsoo asks.

“Consider it a present,” Jongin replies, “from me to you.”

Kyungsoo stares down at the ticket. “What kind of present?”

Jongin gives him a wink over his shoulder as he turns on his heel.

“A muse.”

 

-

 

When Kyungsoo was seven, his mother took him to the traditional markets and taught him how to talk down prices. It wasn’t because they were poor. That was the sort of mindset his mother was trying to rid him of, before he turned out rich and spoiled.  _“Don’t spend more money than you need to. And when something is free, don’t waste it.”_

He crosses his legs in his seat. It’s a nice auditorium. He thinks his father might have taken him to see a play here once, but he’d be too young to remember. The ticket Jongin had given him must have been very expensive. It’s close enough to the stage, but far back enough to get the best acoustics.

As everyone else finds their places, he thinks he’s one of the youngest people in the audience, minus the small group to his left that could be music students. All of them have NYU lanyards.

The stage lights dim, right on time. An orchestra files in, settling into place with a collective ease that Kyungsoo has always admired about bands. The last person to come in, after the conductor, is the pianist who takes his spot centre stage at the black grand piano.

Kyungsoo blinks, lips parted. What a fucker.

The conductor raises his hands. The orchestra raises their instruments. The music begins with a dip and a flourish. Kyungsoo watches Jongin close his eyes, swaying with the melody. His fingers look detached from himself, as if navigating their way across the keys on their own and Jongin is simply a vessel of the music.

The string section quiets, as the wind instruments carry the melody. And on the piano, Jongin’s fingers keep dancing, lilting over the sound of the flutes and the oboes; a conversation, a melody and a harmony.

When it is over, Jongin stands, bows, lifts his head long enough for Kyungsoo to catch the smirk. His tan skin glows under the spotlights.

Kyungsoo isn’t sure if there is a dressing room area, or if he should even go find out. Outside on the street curb, he takes a breath, blows the hair out of his eyes. He can’t stop hearing the tinkling of Jongin’s piano. It’s ringing in his ears, throughout his whole body maybe, clumping at his chest and making it feel tight.

“Didn’t bring me flowers?” Jongin smells like expensive cologne, but mostly of cigarette smoke. Kyungsoo scrunches his nose, and stares down at the curb.

Jongin has changed out of his performance suit. His untucked dress shirt is paired now with tight denim. He has long legs, like Chanyeol. Chanyeol modelled part-time in college, but Kyungsoo can’t really see Jongin as a model; taking orders on how to pose, that is.

“You play,” Kyungsoo says plainly.

“Unfortunate side effect of being my mother’s son,” explains Jongin. He takes a cigarette out from his back pocket. “I got her fingers. She started me out young.”

“Your mom is a pianist?”

Jongin flicks open a lighter and burns the end of the cigarette. “Julliard and everything. Now she just teaches,” he says. “What about yours?”

“Uh, also a teacher. Professor. In Seoul.”

Jongin nods. It’s weird how pretty his fingers look, even when they’re not on a piano and holding a lighted cigarette. “So. Are the creative juices flowing?”

Kyungsoo scoffs. “Excuse me?”

“For your novel. About the classical pianist.”

“Ah,” says Kyungsoo. “Are you supposed to be the muse you were talking about?”

“Of course. You’re welcome, by the way. People paid good money for that, usually.” Jongin grins, exhaling into the air.

Kyungsoo steps forward, watching as the smoke clears between their faces. Jongin peers down at him with curious eyes, and Kyungsoo pulls the cigarette from his fingers, throws it to the ground, puts it out with his heel.

“Buy me coffee, muse.” He starts walking away, and knows without turning around that Jongin is following him.

“ _I’m_  treating  _you_? Do you  _know_  what a favour is?” Jongin sounds amused, not irritated.

Kyungsoo shrugs. “You just got paid, didn’t you?” he replies, “And I don’t spend more money than I need to. Unfortunate side effect of being my mother’s son.” Jongin laughs behind him, the bright, clear one Kyungsoo had heard at the art show too. He sounds younger with that laugh.

“Sure, hyung,” Jongin says, and Kyungsoo starts thinking about his novel.

 

-

 

// 2015. seoul.

Kyungsoo wakes up to Junmyeon’s too-loud voice over the phone saying he’s got Big News, but Junmyeon is the sort to get excited over very small things so Kyungsoo takes his time getting ready before heading to Junmyeon’s office.

Before he leaves, he goes into his bathroom, gripping the edge of his sink and bends over. If he doesn’t do this now, it’ll be much worse later.

He wets his lips tentatively, opening his mouth. With a careful finger, he pushes softly on his tongue at the back of his throat. He gags, chokes, tears up in his eyes as the petals shoot up and out of his esophagus. Their pink skin decorates the sink, then he scoops them up carefully and flushes them down the toilet.

 

-

 

“This news better be the size of the fucking Pacific Ocean,” Kyungsoo says, coffee in hand as he settles onto Junmyeon’s couch, legs-crossed. “It’s Sunday morning.”

Junmyeon turns as Kyungsoo enters, leaning against the edge of his desk. He smiles at Kyungsoo, hesitantly. “I got off the phone with Lionsgate,” he says, “They want to make your novel into a film.”

Kyungsoo pops the lid off his coffee, blowing thoughtfully at the wisp of steam. “Uh, what novel? The one that is ten percent written?”

“Yes,” Junmyeon answers, nibbling at his lower lip. “They want it when you’re done.”

“No thanks.”

“Kyungsoo.” Junmyeon’s shoulders slump and Kyungsoo almost feels bad.

“I’d really rather not,” Kyungsoo says, words muffled as he sips his drink. He feels petals at the back of his throat, and tries to swallow them down with the caffeine.

“Could you think on it more?” Junmyeon frowns. “They were really disappointed when you wouldn’t give them your debut novel. You know, the one about the pianist.”

Kyungsoo’s throat constricts painfully. He licks his lips. “That was years ago.”

“It was two years, and then you also wouldn’t give them  _Labyrinth_ either, even though they asked really nicely.”  _Labyrinth_  was Kyungsoo’s second novel, written in Korean this time, and also had nothing to do with an actual labyrinth. Kyungsoo doesn’t take much pride in that one. He wrote most of it at ungodly hours in the morning, and another good chunk of it drunk that week Chanyeol had visited Seoul.

“Look, just… consider this one,” Junmyeon says, clutching the end of his desk.

Kyungsoo sighs. “I’ll think about it.” He won’t, though. He didn’t write under pen names, only to have Lionsgate come along and unearth him, Hollywood-style.

Junmyeon looks more at ease anyways, even if he knows maybe that Kyungsoo is lying. “By the way, if you’re heading to the bookstore,  _Labyrinth_ is doing really well, if you want to check it out,” Junmyeon says. He’s smiling at him, in that way he smiles with soft eyes and Kyungsoo doesn’t have the heart to rob him of another request.

He stands from the couch, and leaves the rest of his warm coffee on Junmyeon’s desk. “I’ll bring you a signed copy,” he teases, then he exits.

 

-

 

The bookstore is busy for a Sunday. He walks in to see  _Labyrinth_  on the front display. Usually, he would walk past it but today he plucks it from the shelf carefully and opens up to the first chapter. The pages are thick between his fingers, that sharp smell of paper and ink.

On his way to the checkout, he grabs a pen from the stationary section and signs the inside cover exaggeratedly with a,  _To: Junmyeon-hyung best editor ever_ , and then closes the book with a sigh.

He returns the pen, but something catches his eye at the adjoining table. He reads the sign: PHOTOGRAPHY. His hands graze the top of a sleek, black cover with the title printed in large, white block letters.

 _Small World: Pieces of Paris_.

Kyungsoo feels him before he hears him.

“I’ll sign mine if you sign yours.”

The words tickle the back of his neck. He doesn’t turn around, tapping his fingers against the cover. He counts his breaths in his head.

“Nah,” Kyungsoo says, swallowing down the azaleas he feels trying to climb the walls of his throat. “I won’t pay 35,000won for a picture book.”

Jongin laughs. Bright, clear. He comes up beside Kyungsoo and their fingers brush as Jongin takes the copy of  _Small World_  that Kyungsoo is holding.

“It’s good to see you too, hyung.”

 

-

 

// 2012.

The city is cold when Kyungsoo returns. Winter grazes his cheeks where his scarf doesn’t reach, as he shuffles into his apartment. He lives farther from the downtown core than his mother does. He’s never been one for the noise, though he still likes the ease of everything being in walking distance.

He skips the elevator, and takes the three flights of stairs, an old habit his mom used to do to warm up when it was cold. He punches in the door code and gets it wrong a few times before it lights up green, then he brushes the soles of his shoes on the entrance mat to shake off the snow.

The sun comes through his half-drawn blinds in slanted shapes, lighting up trails of dust motes. He’ll have to call Baekhyun later, and scold him for not keeping the place clean, though Baekhyun never does.

He calls his mother first, answers her questions on instinct. “Dad is good,” he says. “He has a girlfriend now, I think.”

“That’s nice,” his mother replies, and she probably means it, which Kyungsoo likes.

“You should go and date too, mom,” he tells her. He heads into the kitchen to fill up a jug of water. Baekhyun, of course, hadn’t watered his plants either.

She laughs. She and Kyungsoo have the same laugh, quiet and infrequent, deep in their register. “I should be saying that to  _you_ ,” she says. “Are you hiding someone from me?” It’s teasing. He lets himself get teased, to indulge her.

“No, mom,” he mumbles.

She says goodbye. Kyungsoo goes back into the kitchen to cook lunch, throwing pork belly into a pan. He murmurs a little prayer under his breath as he cooks because the stove and exhaust vent are old, and if he doesn’t, the fire alarm goes off. After he washes and chops some vegetables, he grabs the kettle from the counter to boil tea.

As he waits for the rice to cook, he opens the blinds. The windows are fogged up with condensation, but he’s not cold enough to turn the heating on just yet. Instead, he grabs an extra sweater from his closet and pulls it over his head.

The meat starts sizzling in the pan just as the doorbell rings. It could only be Baekhyun. He goes to answer it, spatula in hand, but when the door swings open, it is Kim Jongin.

Kyungsoo runs his tongue along the roof of his mouth. “Do I even ask?” he says dryly, as Jongin grins and lets himself in. His cheeks are red from the cold, noticeable even through his dark skin.

“Chanyeol,” answers Jongin. “He was quite happy to indulge me. Said it would be good to have a friend show up to your icebox.”

“Are you a friend?” Kyungsoo mumbles exasperatedly, retreating into the kitchen. He was ready to sleep this afternoon, but it didn’t seem like that was going to happen anymore. Jongin sits down at the dining table. “Also,  _what_  did he say?” He swaps his spatula for tongs because cooking pork with a spatula is very North American, and seems like the sort of thing Jongin will call him out for. With the tongs, Kyungsoo places meat on a plate.

“I think he meant ‘apartment,’” Jongin offers. He purses his lips, considering. “But I do see what he means by icebox. Is it always this cold in here?”

“As cold as my soul,” Kyungsoo deadpans. He shoves rice into a bowl and hands it off to Jongin wordlessly, with a helping of meat, then pours him a cup of tea. Jongin smiles playfully and grabs a pair of chopsticks.

“How’s the novel coming along?” he asks, shoving food into his mouth. He eats sloppily, Kyungsoo thinks. Munching, instead of chewing.

Kyungsoo lays a piece of pork carefully onto his rice. “It’s almost done.”

With his long index finger, Jongin taps the rim of his tea cup. His eyes light up with interest. “Really? Show me a draft.”

Kyungsoo snorts, shaking his head. The nerve on this one. “You know, sometimes, I don’t even show my  _ _editor__  my drafts,” he says.

Jongin hums, bringing his cup to his lips. The hot steam of the tea flows up in a wisp and clouds his expression. “Well, I’m your muse. Not your editor.”

He sips the tea to wash down his food, his long neck tipping back. The skin there looks as soft and even as his face. Kyungsoo rubs his eyes tiredly, and pushes his chopsticks into his mouth, chewing and trying to focus on the taste.

“Hey, this tea is really good,” Jongin comments, reaching across the table to grab the kettle where Kyungsoo had set it down on a large coaster so that it wouldn’t burn the dining table, but Jongin sets it down off the coaster anyways and Kyungsoo sighs.

He watches Jongin pour himself another cup unsteadily. He’s holding the kettle wrong, bad form, but Kyungsoo figures Jongin doesn’t care and Kyungsoo doesn’t either. It’s by habit that Kyungsoo even notices.

Jongin sips it again. “Where do you buy this from?”

“It’s from my grandparents,” Kyungsoo answers, swirling his rice with his chopsticks.

“Ah,” Jongin says, nodding. “Boseong, right?”

Kyungsoo lifts an eyebrow at him. He hadn’t had Jongin pegged as someone with good memory. “Yeah. I grew up around green tea festivals. Lots of tourists.” He learned the finer points of tea from a rather young age. His mother used to tell him that he liked being a know-it-all and showing off all the information he knew to the tourists, so much so that the tour guides would get irritated with him.

He fills up a plate with more meat and places it down on the table. Baekhyun might still come by, so he should probably cook more.

“Oh, I’ve been down there once,” Jongin replies, absently poking at a piece of pork with his chopstick. “With my sister. And my parents. It was fun.” He sets down his chopsticks and finishes off the tea in his cup. “A long time ago, though.”

Kyungsoo stares at him for a moment, and then gathers their empty plates, stacking them neatly in the sink. He runs warm water over them, before wiping his hands on a towel, exiting the kitchen and into his bedroom. He grabs his laptop from his desk.

When he returns, Jongin isn’t in the kitchen. Instead, Kyungsoo finds him farther down the opposite hallway, standing in the closed doorway of the empty room next to the laundry room.

“Guest bedroom?” Jongin asks, as Kyungsoo approaches him. He would scold him for snooping around peoples’ houses, but it isn’t worth the effort.

“Yeah,” Kyungsoo says, shrugging. “More of a storage room, to be honest.”

Jongin stares at Kyungsoo intensely for a second, as if waiting for Kyungsoo to stop him. Kyungsoo doesn’t say anything, so Jongin opens the door. The only thing inside are boxes of old clothes and forgotten home décor lined against the walls. Though next to the window, there is an old painting of Chanyeol’s hidden behind the curtains that Kyungsoo had never gotten around to hanging up. Aside from that, the room holds nothing but dust.

“It really is storage,” Jongin frowns, disappointed.

Kyungsoo rolls his eyes, and pads off into the living room. “That’s what I just said.” He opens up his laptop on the coffee table.

Jongin follows him out and sits down comfortably on the couch. With his bare feet cross-legged, settled in with his lopsided grin, Kyungsoo thinks he looks strangely at home in his apartment. “I was expecting to see, you know, your secret girlfriend’s panties or something,” Jongin says. “Something juicy I could hold against you.”

The Word document takes a little while to load. Kyungsoo nibbles impatiently on his lower lip, gliding a finger in between the spaces on the keyboard. “I don’t have a secret girlfriend,” he murmurs.

“Not even past girlfriends’?” Jongin asks. His long legs stretch out onto the coffee table. He wriggles his toes unpleasantly. “I’m not ashamed to say I haven’t thrown out what my exes’ leave behind, if you know what I mean.”

Kyungsoo copies and pastes just the first chapter onto a new document and closes the full one. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” he says blandly, then passes his laptop off to Jongin.

“Good. Or else my current girlfriend might get mad at me,” Jongin replies, laughing quietly. “Her name is Soojung. She’s kind of prickly. Like you.”

He taps his finger along the edge of the laptop keyboard. He’s staring at the screen but Kyungsoo doesn’t think he’s reading anything.

“Was she in New York?” asks Kyungsoo.

“Not at the art show. She lives here and couldn’t make it out.” Jongin glides his hand across the track pad, then his mouth lifts into a teasing, curious smile. “You should meet her. I think you guys would get along, maybe.”

Kyungsoo stares at the shape of Jongin’s lips, frozen for a moment. He blinks, standing up from the couch. “Yeah, maybe,” he says.

As Jongin reads, Kyungsoo goes back into the kitchen and washes the dishes. It’s quiet for once, and Kyungsoo realizes just how loud his apartment is with Jongin in it. Even as he turns the faucet on to rinse, the running water still doesn’t fill the silence in.

Kyungsoo doesn’t know what to make of the silence; whether it means Jongin likes it or hates it. He doesn’t know why he cares either.

He starts cooking again, tofu stew this time, for when Baekhyun stops by.

Then he hears Jongin shuffling from the living room. Kyungsoo leaves the water to boil and walks back to the living room with more tea.

“Huh,” says Jongin. He places the laptop carefully onto the coffee table. His feet are tucked back onto the couch now, his expression unlike the ones Kyungsoo is used to seeing.

Kyungsoo sits down on the other side of the couch, far enough so that the space between them could fit a whole other person. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

He hugs his tea cup in his hands, staring down at the liquid and sees a bit of his own reflection. “That was… really good,” Jongin says again, eyebrows drawn together, as if he’s confused.

Kyungsoo rolls his eyes, and swallows his tea. “Gee, thanks.”

“Well, technically, that’s more of a compliment to myself,” Jongin continues, and his expression is back to normal. “Your protag is clearly me.” He’s drumming his fingers across his lap. Whether it’s conscious or not, Kyungsoo doesn’t know, but it looks like the Tchaikovsky piece he had played at the concert. Kyungsoo can tell because the image of Jongin’s fingers hasn’t really left his head.

He doesn’t say this, though. He doesn’t say anything as Jongin laughs, eyes crinkling at the edges.

“See? You won’t even deny it,” Jongin says contentedly, looking awfully pleased with himself. He grabs the laptop again and scrolls down, tracing a finger across the screen, even though Kyungsoo cringes as he does because he hates fingerprints on his laptop.

“ _‘… Handsomely shrouded in a veil of mystery. The orchestra begins, and the man takes them on a journey with the grace of his fingers,_ ’” Jongin recites. He closes the chapter again, eyes twinkling with the same mischief Kyungsoo has become familiar with. It’s the sort of expression people write characters about, one that never gives too much of itself but makes you feel like it would.

“You  _like_  me, hyung,” Jongin singsongs. It’s most definitely a joke with a tone like that, but Kyungsoo can’t figure out why Jongin seems to be leaning into his space. Their bodies have shifted on the couch, closer together.

Kyungsoo swallows around nothing in his dry mouth. “That’s the magic of words, Jongin,” he says quietly. “It makes you feel things, which makes you believe things.” His tongue feels heavy under the weight of Jongin’s eyes.

“But oh yes,” Kyungsoo goes on, with an air of mock disdain, “I forgot writing isn’t art to you.”

Jongin’s fingers have stopped dancing to his silent music. He stares at Kyungsoo solemnly, waiting for an explosive reaction. Why did their conversations always end up like this? Kyungsoo wondered. As if every phrase was a challenge, a game, and Kyungsoo wanted desperately to win. “Art is about something visual,” Jongin says after a moment.

“Art is about a  _feeling_ ,” Kyungsoo replies, leaning in because Jongin does, and Kyungsoo is not intimidated. Even as their breaths are suddenly brushing skin, and Kyungsoo can count each one of Jongin’s eyelashes, framing those large, black eyes that seem to suck up every piece of Kyungsoo’s thoughts. Jongin is running his tongue between his lips. Kyungsoo matches him. “And I made you feel.”

Somehow, Jongin’s hand is somewhere on Kyungsoo’s thigh, warm and firm as his fingers play Tchaikovsky through the fabric of Kyungsoo’s pants again. There’s a strange taste at the back of Kyungsoo’s throat, that isn’t from the tea.

“Can you  _feel_ that?” Jongin says, tiny, tiny smile pulling his mouth. It’s like he knows, Kyungsoo thinks with a rising panic he desperately fights down. He must know. “Am I a piece of art then, hyung?” Jongin whispers. His lips find their way perfectly onto Kyungsoo’s.

When Kyungsoo looks back, he wouldn’t remember who leaned in first or why it happened or even how long it lasted, but from time to time, he thinks there was a flicker of something in Jongin’s black eyes when they pulled away and Kyungsoo, if he could do it all over again, would have taken the time to ask Jongin what that flicker meant, or if he had imagined it. He would have asked if Jongin felt anything when they kissed. A feeling. Any feeling.

The water in the kitchen starts boiling, a high-pitched whistle slicing the tension, and all those questions fade away into some hazy distance, slipping out of their grasp and never to be found again until it was much too late.

 

-

 

// same night

The knock on the door finally comes half-past midnight. Kyungsoo closes his laptop and kicks the blanket off his lap as he stands from the couch. He makes sure to turn up the thermostat before unlocking the door and pulling it open.

“There’s seafood tofu stew on the stove. It’s still warm,” Kyungsoo says, turning back around towards the living room couch. He keeps the lights off as he huddles back under the blanket and continues writing.

“I’m late again. I’m sorry.” A lengthy pause. “I had to—I couldn’t risk…” Kyungsoo looks up from his laptop. It’s hard to study Baekhyun’s expression in the dark, but his tone is earnest and apologetic, if not a little sad. It’s a tone he uses too often with Kyungsoo and Kyungsoo doesn’t like it.

“Don’t be,” Kyungsoo shrugs. The only light in the apartment is from his open screen and the dull, single bulb in the kitchen. Apologies are never what he wants to hear. He doesn’t understand them. A simple hello is fine. Something normal.

Baekhyun goes into the kitchen and serves himself a bowl of stew. He grabs the kettle from the cupboard above the stove, boiling water and making himself tea. Then he takes his food and shuffles into the living room with Kyungsoo, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“How was New York?” asks Baekhyun.

“The usual,” Kyungsoo replies. “Said hello to my dad. Went to an art show.” He rubs sleep out of his eyes with his knuckles, stifling a yawn.

“You should sleep,” Baekhyun says, setting his spoon down carefully in its bowl. He grips his warm tea cup in the other hand, biting his lip. “You know, if it’s a hassle to have me crash here, I don’t have to.”

Kyungsoo thinks he hears another dumb apology coming up, and he sighs deeply through his nose. “It’s okay, Baekhyun. I don’t mind, all right? You don’t have to—“ He catches himself with a shake of his head. They’ve been friends for so long. Kyungsoo is just fine with the friendship.

Baekhyun climbs up onto the couch and sits beside him, warm hand finding its way on top of Kyungsoo’s. The image of Jongin’s smile from earlier flashes through Kyungsoo’s mind fleetingly.  _Can you_ feel  _that?_

The kitchen light stretches toward them in a muted glow, lighting one side of Baekhyun’s face just the slightest. Even in the dark, Kyungsoo sees the tense line of his mouth and has the horrible urge to lean forward and kiss the tension off his face.

He might have actually done it, a long time ago when they were both stupid enough to think that it was okay to do that.

The moment passes, as these sorts of moments always do, and Baekhyun pulls back and sips his tea again.

It is better like this, Kyungsoo thinks, as he goes back to his work and Baekhyun starts humming a song under his breath. Kyungsoo, after all, was always one for the quieter, more peaceful path—the one with the least amount of risk and wreckage and heartache.


	2. Chapter 2

// 2015.

Jongin ends up signing  _Pieces of Paris_  and forces it into Kyungsoo’s hands as they leave the bookstore. They end up in some corner of the city Kyungsoo has never been to. He follows Jongin wordlessly through a low doorway, into a grimy, cramped entrance.

Inside isn’t much better. Kyungsoo can’t determine whether the place is more of a bar or a club. The lights overhead flash a multi-coloured rotation of blue, green and pink, and there is a dance floor but no one is really dancing. And the DJ, set up against the far wall, is bopping his head to a ballad.

Jongin navigates them easily to a booth towards the back, waving at the bartender as they pass.

“What is this place even?” Kyungsoo says, staring at the cracked walls. Posters are tacked on haphazardly, some peeling at the corners. “You know what most people do on Sunday mornings? Sleep. Or go to church.”

Jongin gives him a cheeky look. The bartender comes over and places two cups of something identical in front of them, even though they hadn’t ordered anything. “Is this your way of greeting me?” Jongin pouts exaggeratedly. He’s done something different with his hair. It’s combed to the side, away from his forehead, and Kyungsoo studies the sharp lines of his jaw. “How rude, hyung.”

For a while, Kyungsoo stares at the drink in front of him, debating. He touches a finger to the rim of the cup tentatively.  _Small World_ is sitting in his lap, hard and heavy, and he wonders if he’ll actually look through this one. But there was always something about going through Jongin’s photographs that was… they were too personal. Kyungsoo felt like he was looking into his life from the outside.

“Paris, huh?” Kyungsoo says, casually. He’s never been to Europe. It seemed like the sort of place you only get to dream about, a mere idea that exists only in the mind. But then again, to Kyungsoo, Jongin was a lot like that too. “Was it nice?”

Jongin holds his glass up from the top with loose fingers, swishing the liquid back and forth. “Look through the photobook and find out.”

Lifting his own glass, Kyungsoo sips his drink. Club soda. Weak. “You know I’m not going to. I—“ He bends over as a cough shoots up from the pit of his stomach. It’s a big cough, the kind he can’t cover up and swallow down. Instinctively, he ducks his head so his whole face is out of view, and brings both hands up to his mouth.

He can feel the smoothness of the azalea petals grace the insides of his palm, as he squeezes them and bunches them all up into the pocket of his windbreaker.

Jongin is staring at him, with his black eyes, the space between his brows crinkled, and Kyungsoo wants to smooth it down with a thumb. “You’re sick?” Jongin says.

Kyungsoo waves him away. He knows how pale his skin gets after a cough like that, and hopes that Jongin doesn’t notice under the dim lights. “It’s just a bad cough,” Kyungsoo shrugs. He tastes blood on his tongue, and he quickly chases it down with the soda. “It’s because you’re back in the country and my body is allergic to you.” He expects Jongin to laugh, but he doesn’t.

It isn’t entirely convincing either and Jongin doesn’t look entirely convinced, but over the years, Kyungsoo has found that they don’t ask each other many questions. For better or for worse.

“I read  _Labyrinth_ ,” Jongin says, after a moment. His eyes flit about uncertainly. He isn’t looking at Kyungsoo. For the first time in the past half hour, Kyungsoo wants to know what possessed Jongin to come back from Europe—abrupt and without warning, just like his departure, though Kyungsoo doesn’t allow himself to reminisce. But there must be a story behind the sad downturn of Jongin’s eyes, Kyungsoo thinks.

“Did you?”

“Yeah,” Jongin murmurs. “It was different than the pianist one. It was… like you wrote entire paragraphs while you were high or something.”

Kyungsoo snorts, in spite of himself. “Is that bad?”

Jongin raises an eyebrow. “Were you actually high?”

There was nothing interesting about  _Labyrinth,_  in Kyungsoo’s opinion. The story followed a man over the course of forty years, navigating through the metaphorical maze of life and love. Only every story ever written.

But it was true—the writing style was off-kilter and avant-garde and at times, very strange, but “its genuine characters solidified the novel as one of the greatest of this generation.” As critics would put it. And Kyungsoo had walked out of Junmyeon’s office because he wasn’t one to read reviews. They were stupid.

To Kyungsoo, the novel was nothing but a reminder of late nights and too much beer and conversations he would rather forget. “Drunk, not high,” Kyungsoo tells Jongin.

After a pause, Jongin cocks his head to the side. His gaze is searching but Kyungsoo tries not to meet it. “Well, what novel are you working on right now?” he asks.

“I’ve barely started the third chapter so don’t ask if you can read anything,” Kyungsoo answers coolly.

Jongin leans back into the ugly red upholstering of the booth, and crosses his arms. “So prickly,” he teases. “Just tell me what it’s about.”

Underneath the table, Kyungsoo lifts a leg and kicks him but Jongin catches Kyungsoo’s foot between his own ankles, grinning. Kyungsoo frowns and attempts to yank his feet back futilely. Their ankles stay locked, and Kyungsoo huffs.

“The main character returns to his hometown, falls in love with someone who travels the world for a living,” Kyungsoo says quietly, though he doesn’t even mean to. His voice tucks itself under the chatter and the music and the sound of glasses clinking against glasses.

When he looks at Jongin, he sees Jongin’s lips have parted as if he was about to say something and then stopped. Kyungsoo takes the moment to pull back his feet. He can feel the phantom warmth from Jongin’s legs clinging to his own.

“That’s all you can dish?” Jongin presses. His eyes are missing their playful glint. He runs a hand through his freshly cut hair, and it falls right back into place when he lets go. Kyungsoo’s chest tightens painfully—a sudden, intense pain—and he coughs more flowers into his hands, hiding them quickly.

He catches his lower lip between his teeth, then releases it. “It’s about a man who likes another man, but isn’t sure if that man likes him back.”

Above them, the coloured lights shift. They turn from pink, to green, to blue and then to a normal, dim white. The DJ stops playing music, shuffling off his little stage to take his break. The new silence rings in their ears.

Jongin brings his cup to his lips. “That sounds romantic.”

“I’m going to kill the protagonist,” Kyungsoo says. “So he never finds out the answer to his question.”

“Even more romantic, then,” Jongin smiles wanly, raising his glass, although Kyungsoo doesn’t know to what he is toasting. The air seems hot and dry when Kyungsoo inhales, and he stuffs both hands into his pockets, trying to keep his head from spinning.

“So does he like girls or something?” comes Jongin’s voice again.

Kyungsoo blinks at him. “What?”

The petals brush the warm skin of Kyungsoo’s hand, their smooth, deadly texture grazing against his knuckles. Jongin is staring at Kyungsoo with a look that is saying so many things, and nothing at all.

_Am I piece of art, hyung?_

“Why doesn’t the man love the other man?” asks Jongin. He’s brushing hair away from his forehead again, and Kyungsoo can’t look away. He can’t tear his eyes from the smooth shape of Jongin’s face, his long fingers. His lips. The way the flickering lightbulb over their booth rests its light so delicately at the tips of his lashes. Somehow, it always ends up like this with Jongin, Kyungsoo thinks. Somehow, he always ends up captivated.

Kyungsoo squeezes the flower petals, throat closing.

_Why doesn’t the man love the other man?_

“I don’t know,” Kyungsoo says.

 

-

 

// 2013.

Winter passes, and spring settles in the city. By the time summer creeps up on them, Kyungsoo finds himself in Jongin’s apartment more often than he would like to admit. Jongin lives closer to the bustle and his neighbourhood is much louder and livelier at night.

The apartment itself is small and strangely arranged. There is only one piece of furniture—a couch, shabby and worn, facing a mounted television. The kitchen is simple, with no dining room table, and no curtains lining the windows.

But the space never feels empty. All these details are overshadowed by the sleek black grand piano that is placed right in the entrance with its top propped open.

On a Saturday afternoon, Kyungsoo sits on Jongin’s stupid couch with his laptop perched warm on his lap. Jongin doesn’t keep his apartment nearly as cold as Kyungsoo would like. Instead, Jongin prefers to “save electricity” and walks around without a shirt on.

“You haven’t moved from that spot in two hours,” Jongin comments from the kitchen. He is stirring instant ramen in a pot over the stove and Kyungsoo can smell it.

The brightness of the laptop screen is starting to hurt his eyes, but he blinks the dryness away. “I’m editing the final chapter.”

“It’s done?” Jongin turns the stove off and walks over to the couch with a hot bowl balanced in one hand. “Can I read it?”

“Of course not.”

Jongin makes an unimpressed noise and slurps his ramen noisily. He doesn’t offer any to Kyungsoo but Kyungsoo can tell he’s left him some in the pot because he leaves the pot on the stove. Kyungsoo can’t say when exactly it had come to this, living half in each other’s spaces, but every time he walks into Jongin’s bathroom and sees his own toothbrush in the cup by the sink, it leaves him caught in a strange conflict where he can’t decide if he likes seeing pieces of himself in Jongin’s life or if it actually scares the shit out of him.

Kyungsoo closes his laptop and rubs at his eyes. He eats some of Jongin’s instant ramen while Jongin comes back from his bedroom with his camera.

He turns the television on and leaves it on the news as he settles onto the couch beside Kyungsoo, fiddling with the large black lens between his hands. It looks like a piece of foreign machinery to Kyungsoo, but Jongin picks it apart with a sort of lazy ease, popping off the detachable flash component without so much as a glance. It’s like watching someone solve a Rubick’s cube—pattern and muscle memory.

Entertainment news plays out on the television. The shrill voice of the show host is preppy and irritating, but Kyungsoo finds gossip news annoying in general. He stirs his ramen slowly with his chopsticks and watches the steam rise up.

“They’re  _dating_?” Jongin says loudly, and Kyungsoo lifts an eyebrow at the TV screen.

“Wow, I wouldn’t have pegged you for an idol fan, Mr. Classical Pianist.” Kyungsoo jibes, poking a stray noodle as he blows at the soup broth.

“Really? Are you saying you never had an idol fantasy as a teenager, hyung?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe you,” Jongin states.

Kyungsoo rolls his eyes. “My best friend was a trainee and all the stress just wasn’t my kind of thing.”

He listens to the annoying show host lady talk at length about the couple’s relationship, and brings his soup bowl to his lips, sipping tentatively. The broth is hot and stings his tongue.

Jongin blows some dust off his lens, reattaching it to the camera. “Well, I think Kim Taeyeon and Byun Baekhyun look like a power couple.”

On the screen, Baekhyun has his arm snaked daintily around Taeyeon’s waist. Camera flash lights up their skin as they smile on the red carpet at the premiere of some movie they did together, last year. Kyungsoo remembers that night because that was the night Baekhyun broke up with him. Or something like that.

As the news segment shifts, Kyungsoo shoves noodles into his mouth. “I think so too,” he says.

 

-

 

// same night

They end up watching some Hollywood action movie on DVD in the bedroom, while Kyungsoo spends the majority of the time criticizing the poor plot construction and narrative. Jongin argues that people don’t watch action movies for the plot.

“It’s about the fight scenes, obviously,” he explains, lifting his camera to his face and snapping a picture—of what, Kyungsoo doesn’t know, but he’s also half-asleep and doesn’t really pay Jongin much mind. “The explosives and gushing blood.”

In a state of delirious late-night consciousness, they slip in and out of Korean and English. Kyungsoo pulls a face. “Oh, right. I forgot that art is  _visual_ ,” he scoffs and Jongin kicks him in the stomach without force.

Mostly, it tickles and Kyungsoo lets out a laugh against his own will and vaguely, from the corner of his eye, he sees Jongin raising his camera again. The shutter clicks. Jongin smiles.

“I should go home,” Kyungsoo sighs, swinging his feet off the bed. “The bus will stop running soon.”

Jongin nods and stows his camera away. Kyungsoo goes out into the living room, gathering his messenger bag and carefully sliding his laptop into place. A stack of papers tumbles off the edge of the coffee table as Kyungsoo pulls his bag away.

He bends down to retrieve them, furrowing his eyebrows curiously at the Chinese characters. The papers are all letters. The first few are messy and unfinished but at the top, they all read in English: “To Lu Han.”

Kyungsoo doesn’t understand the Chinese that follows. He glances at the ones underneath, this time written in Korean. They have no name at the top.

Jongin appears in the living room, staring at the papers in Kyungsoo’s hands.

“Who is Lu Han?” Kyungsoo asks. He puts down the letters, and hoists his bag on his shoulder. His question is casual. Jongin’s face is impassive, but Kyungsoo sees where the line of his shoulders seem to tense.

It’s a long time before Jongin says anything. His eyes look distant, Kyungsoo thinks. As if he is standing in front of Kyungsoo, but his mind is somewhere much farther away.

“A friend,” answers Jongin. “From China. When I was putting together  _Small World: Beijing_.” His fingers curl at his sides. Kyungsoo nods and walks himself to the door. He slips his shoes on quietly, offering Jongin a two-fingered wave as he exits.

The city passes in blurry streaks of light through the bus window. Kyungsoo thinks of swirling paint on canvases.

But mostly, as Kyungsoo rests his head against the glass, he thinks of Jongin’s black eyes—like bottomless pools of ink. You could get lost in them.

 

-

 

// January 2016.

One day, the television tells Kyungsoo he is dying. No one, yet, knows why it has started. Kyungsoo’s fingers stop typing across his keyboard. He watches the news segment quietly as it flashes clips of bloody flowers pouring out of people’s throats. It’s an outbreak, they say. In Japan, they give it a name.  _Hanahaki_.

Kyungsoo turns the television off and finishes writing his chapter.

 

-

 

// 2014.

Chanyeol visits Seoul for a week, and Kyungsoo begins his second novel titled  _Labyrinth._ Like most times that he visits, Chanyeol’s presence in Kyungsoo’s apartment is boisterous, and seems to tuck itself into every nook and cranny of the modest space.

They stand in the kitchen side by side at breakfast. Chanyeol is making a mess of egg whites in the pan as Kyungsoo stares on disapprovingly.

“Oh, lighten up. I’ll clean it, okay?” He serves the messy eggs onto plates. Kyungsoo spoons a large helping of kimchi into a bowl because Chanyeol never really eats it in New York, and always tends to overeat when he visits.

Chanyeol asks about Kyungsoo’s novel and Kyungsoo answers in monosyllables until his mother stops by to say hello. Chanyeol is good with Kyungsoo’s mom and Kyungsoo’s mom likes to dote on him, almost more than she dotes on Kyungsoo.

“I hear your art pieces are doing very well,” she says to him in English so that Chanyeol doesn’t have to struggle with his pigeon Korean. Kyungsoo brings out some tea. He lets his mother pour it and serve it herself because she does it with a lot more grace than Kyungsoo does. Chanyeol dips his head as he takes a cup from her.

“Ah, well I’m very fortunate,” he says. “The opportunities really present themselves, when you know where to look.”

She smiles largely. She loves that stuff. Kyungsoo rolls his eyes and Chanyeol wiggles his eyebrows at him. Always the charmer. “What are you up to lately?” she asks.

“Still painting. Helping one of my professors teach at the university, actually,” he replies. “But I also have my side jobs. I was commissioned to do a sort of mural piece in the city.”

“Oh, really? What for?”

“I think it’s to discourage graffiti.” He turns to Kyungsoo and frowns. “Speaking of my art, I don’t see that painting of mine hanging up on your walls.”

Kyungsoo swallows his tea, pressing his lips into a cordial smile. “Haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

Kyungsoo’s mother scolds him for being rude, and she banters with Chanyeol back and forth for a bit about Kyungsoo’s surly attitude. Kyungsoo lets them. He suspects it is somewhat relieving for his mother, any mother, to rant about their children.

His mother doesn’t stay for lunch, claiming paperwork, so Kyungsoo walks her out. Chanyeol goes into the kitchen to defrost mackerel and Kyungsoo’s mother tugs a bit on her son’s sleeve in the doorway.

“Chanyeol’s gotten so tall. Hasn’t he gotten so tall?” she says, conversationally as Kyungsoo helps her fit her arms through the sleeves of her coat. She is speaking in soft Korean, which is strange because they were speaking in English all morning.

“Yes. I suppose he has.”

“He’s very charming.”

“He is.”

“Very sweet.”

Kyungsoo shrugs.

“Talented  _and_  successful. That’s not common in the world of art,” she goes on, and Kyungsoo registers the dip of her tone. It’s like when he takes her out shopping and she holds out a shirt and explains why she wants to buy it.

“I suppose it isn’t,” says Kyungsoo.

“Invite me to dinner before he leaves, yes?”

“Sure.”

She lingers in the hallway. “I… like him very much, Kyungsoo.” She lifts her eyes and Kyungsoo’s whole body tenses under the gaze. There is a pause, a short one, but the silence within it is tangible. Kyungsoo feels his own heartbeat.

“I would—I mean I… approve of him. Is what I am saying.”

Kyungsoo stares at her, really stares at her, and wonders how long she has known. He searches, in a climbing panic, for some remnants of judgement.

“It’s not like that,” he says.

“Is it not? I sort of assumed with the way you had read up crazily on art and art history in college. You’re not someone to spend time on things you aren’t interested in.”

“It’s not like that.” She is right to some extent. It was like that back then, but not so much now. Kyungsoo learned not to dwell on things you couldn’t have.

“I think I knew since Baekhyun. When you became best friends in high school, I think I noticed something different.”

“Baekhyun and I aren’t—“

“I know. Of course,” she nods, but she also gives him a look that tells him she knows she isn’t entirely wrong. “He has a pretty girlfriend. But you don’t want one, do you? You never have. You could have just said so.”

“It’s—that’s not how it works—“

“Give people more credit, Kyungsoo. You keep everyone at an arms-length,” she says. Very gently, as if afraid to break him, she grazes his cheeks with the tips of her fingers. They aren’t very affectionate so it is a little awkward, the movement foreign, but Kyungsoo’s heart swells anyways. “Isn’t it suffocating to live so afraid all the time? You never know what you’re missing if you don’t give people a chance.”

 

-

 

// 2013

In the middle of the week, Kyungsoo walks into Jongin’s unlocked apartment to find it in an even deeper state of disarray than it usually is. The top of the grand piano is closed, various items of clothing littered both above and underneath it.

There is a half-made pot of spaghetti sitting on the kitchen stove, boiling unattended. Kyungsoo frowns and turns the gas off. On his way to the couch, he delicately pushes aside a pair of women’s underwear with his toe and then places his laptop on the coffee table.

Jongin’s bedroom door is closed, low indistinguishable murmurs seeping through the walls. Kyungsoo heads back into the kitchen, turning the exhaust on just to make noise and then finishes cooking the forgotten pasta sauce.

A few minutes later, the door opens. Jongin emerges with his usual black sweatpants, a shirt thrown over his shoulder. There is a woman behind him, with a curtain of soft brown hair, padding in barefoot as she follows Jongin into the kitchen.

“Sorry hyung, I lost track of time.” He sits down at the kitchen counter, putting on his shirt. He pats the stool beside him. The woman slides in comfortably. She is very pretty, Kyungsoo thinks, even without makeup on. She hugs her torso a little as Kyungsoo turns to look at her. She probably isn’t wearing anything aside from the long white button down Kyungsoo assumes is Jongin’s.

“Thanks for finishing the cooking,” Jongin adds, as Kyungsoo grabs three plates from the cupboard. The woman’s eyebrows lift a little at him, but she doesn’t say anything.

Kyungsoo throws Jongin a hard look. “You left the stove on, dumb ass.”

“Ah. My bad.”

He plates three servings of the spaghetti and pushes two towards them. The woman smiles as Kyungsoo hands her a fork.

“Sorry, if I’d known you were here, I would have brought something over,” Kyungsoo says to her. He twirls his fork around the noodles. “A bottle of wine or rice cakes.”

Her jaw falls slightly, and she stares at Kyungsoo uncertainly. “Oh—that’s—really… it’s fine.” She flits her eyes to Jongin and then back again. “I’m sorry I’m not dressed more appropriately.”

Kyungsoo shrugs. “How rude of Jongin to not even introduce us.”

Jongin smiles around his spaghetti. “Kyungsoo-hyung, this is my girlfriend Soojung. Soojung, this is Kyungsoo-hyung. He’s a writer.”

“A writer?” She looks either pleased or amused, Kyungsoo can’t tell. “That’s surprising. Jongin doesn’t have much appreciation for literature.”

“I’m Kyungsoo-hyung’s muse,” Jongin offers, helpfully. He wiggles his eyebrows at Kyungsoo, but Kyungsoo ignores him.

Soojung wipes some sauce off her thin lips, and grins amiably. “He’s never mentioned you, Kyungsoo-ssi.”

“Well, he’s mentioned you to me,” Kyungsoo replies, in a perfectly even tone. Somehow, it doesn’t feel any different than when Chanyeol first introduced him to Nana, or when Kyungsoo had dinner with Kim Taeyeon at Baekhyun’s apartment that one time.

Jongin is looking down at his plate when Kyungsoo flicks his gaze over at him briefly. “We aren’t friends so he wouldn’t talk about me.” Kyungsoo laughs as he says it and Soojung laughs along with him. “It’s nice to meet you, finally. Jongin says he thinks we’d get along.”

“Oh?”

“Something about us both being prickly.”

Soojung hums. “Is that how he described me?”

Jongin makes a helpless face. “ _Hyung_ ,” he whines, as Soojung punches him in the shoulder. It’s not a playful, affectionate swat—she actually looks like she is trying to bruise him—and Kyungsoo can appreciate that so he chuckles slightly.

When they finish eating, Jongin and Soojung claim the couch. They marathon variety shows as Kyungsoo takes his laptop to the kitchen counter. Soojung tries to tell him that he can work on the couch beside them if he wants to, but Kyungsoo just shakes his head and thanks her anyways.

Later, when Jongin has decided he needs a shower, Soojung walks back into the kitchen to brew coffee.

“So you’re working on a book right now?” she says, as she plugs in the coffee maker. Kyungsoo looks up from his screen. She crouches down to search a few cupboards, then frowns.

“Upper right, next to the fridge,” Kyungsoo gestures with his chin. Reluctantly, she walks over to the refrigerator and pulls open the adjacent cupboard. Jongin has a wide assortment of ground coffee that Kyungsoo steals from time to time.

“Thanks,” she says, pouring a few tablespoons into the coffee machine filter. She is quiet for a few minutes, and Kyungsoo is about to answer her question when she cuts in again. “You really know your way around his kitchen.”

“I come by more often than I should.”

“To write?”

“Pretty much.”

“Why, though?” She laughs lightly. “It’s a terrible mess in here.”

“It is,” Kyungsoo says. “But it gets stuffy in your own house. Not good for writing.”

“Ah. Change of setting and such?” She closes the lid on the coffee machine, turning it on. The liquid starts to trickle out.

“It helps me think more.” Kyungsoo looks down at his screen, reading over his last sentence. He’s been re-writing the same scene for two days straight.

Soojung’s voice cuts through his thoughts. “Plus he’s your muse?” she says.

Kyungsoo blinks. “He gave himself that title.”

“I believe you.” She smiles playfully and leans her back against the fridge. She isn’t wearing any pants but this doesn’t seem to bother her. “Would you like coffee?”

“Sure, thank you.”

“You know, I hate how Jongin never talks about his friends.” She pours him a mug and hands it to him black. “Or even about himself.”

“We’re not friends.”

Her hands still, mid-pour. The mug almost overflows. “Why do you say that?” She gives him a long, hard look. Kyungsoo waits for her to glance away, but it’s almost like she’s trying to memorize the pattern of his irises. Kyungsoo glances away first.

“How long have you been dating?” he asks her.

“Six months or so. But we’ve known each other for years,” she replies. Her coffee arrangement is complicated. She takes a spoon out and measures the milk, cream and sugar proportions. “We’re family friends actually.” She pauses and frowns. “Whatever that means. I mean, our moms are friends. But Jongin’s always been…”

“Sure,” says Kyungsoo, because it doesn’t seem like she knows how to finish that sentence.

“Look, Kyungsoo-ssi.”

“Just Kyungsoo is okay.”

She brings her mug to her lips but doesn’t sip it. The steam rises up to her skin. She closes her eyes for a moment, re-opens them a second later. Whatever she was going to say, it seems like she has scrapped it and decided against it. When she speaks again, it is very soft. “Not friends, huh?”

She isn’t looking at him. Kyungsoo wonders if she is speaking to herself. He catches her words only because he reads her lips.

“I found some letters in his bedroom,” she says. Kyungsoo drinks his coffee. It melts hotly on his tongue. “Some were written in Chinese… some were… in Korean. And they were addressed to his older sister.”

“Oh. And?”

She looks up from her mug, sharply. “He was writing to his sister, Kyungsoo-ssi.”

“Just Kyungsoo.”

“His  _sister_ ,” she says again.

“I didn’t know he had siblings,” says Kyungsoo.

Soojung nods slowly. The shower from the bathroom is still running. “Jongin’s older sister is dead,” she says. Kyungsoo’s coffee gets lodged in his throat. Bitter, sticky.

“She died when he was in high school.”

Kyungsoo tries to remember the look on Jongin’s face when Kyungsoo had held the letters. His eyes. Kyungsoo remembers his eyes—a storm of colours, none of which Kyungsoo could decode.

“I want to ask him about it but I don’t know how…” she licks her lips, and seems to catch herself. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to unload onto you.”

“It’s all right.”

“You don’t seem close to Jongin,” she says. “But his eyes change when he looks at you.”

For some reason, Kyungsoo thinks about that first hazy afternoon in his apartment, sitting on his couch. Jongin’s lips had been on his. And he’d tasted like tea and Kyungsoo had wanted—

It’s all so irrational. And Soojung is staring at him. Kyungsoo clears his head, as if afraid she’ll somehow read his thoughts.

“There’s also the letters he’s wrote to ‘Lu Han’,” she mumbles, setting her mug down onto the counter between them. “He writes all these letters that he never sends.”

“You know who Lu Han is?” Kyungsoo isn’t sure why that is his first question.

Soojung tilts her head. The shower water shuts off. It is quiet now. Kyungsoo inhales and smells caffeine, and wonders why her gaze feels so sharp.

“I think I know,” she says.

The bathroom door opens. Soojung turns around and starts cleaning out the coffee maker. They don’t speak until Jongin rejoins them.

 

-

 

// 2016.

Spring is late. Snow clings stubbornly to bare trees, even as February draws to a close. The world passes through Kyungsoo’s windows in slow motion, it feels like. Passes on without him.

He pulls himself out of bed, not because he wants to but because the strange flowers in his throat tell him he must. He coughs the azaleas into the trash bin, leaning his forehead onto the sink. The metal is cool on his skin. His legs feel weak. Out of use. He hadn’t left his bed yesterday.

Junmyeon calls after breakfast.

“Not today, hyung,” Kyungsoo says, boiling water over the stove for tea. “I’ve come down with something. It’s not serious, don’t worry. Maybe another time, though.”

“I’m coming over, then,” Junmyeon replies urgently. Kyungsoo’s stomach flops. “I’ll cook for you.” The line clicks.

“ _Fuck_.”

He heads back into the bathroom, fixing his hair and pulling a clean shirt over his head. He splashes his face with cold water and tries to slap colour into his cheeks. The doorbell rings, not an hour later.

Junmyeon cooks him a whole pot of warm broth and vegetables. They watch a drama afterwards, something cheesy involving an architect and an intern and terribly written dialogue but Junmyeon is obsessed with it and Kyungsoo isn’t in the mood to argue.

“Byun Baekhyun is an amazing actor,” Junmyeon comments, legs-crossed on the couch. He is thoroughly engrossed. “I think I hero-worship him a little.”

“Ew. Why. He’s my age, you know.”

Junmyeon laughs. “Does that mean I can’t be a fan?”

Kyungsoo makes a vague noise, pulling on the collar of his shirt. His skin is burning. “He’s not that great.”

“You’re such a hater,” Junmyeon scoffs, but he looks more amused than anything. He’s always gotten a kick out of arguing with Kyungsoo, anyways. “Don’t shit-talk unless you know him.”

Kyungsoo purses his lips. “True.” He would laugh but he’s too tired.

Later, when the episode is over, Junmyeon excuses himself to the bathroom and Kyungsoo packs up the rest of his soup for him.

The bathroom.

Kyungsoo drops the empty pot, and it cracks the marble tiles by his feet. His throat squeezes. He bolts down the hallway.

It’s too late. The door is open. Junmyeon is crouched by the trash bin, a pink azalea petal fitted delicately between his fingers. The tips are tinged dark and crusted with dried blood.

“You’re—“ The word breaks abruptly. Junmyeon lifts his hand to his mouth, and his gaze when he turns to Kyungsoo is heavy and sharp. Kyungsoo says nothing. Junmyeon slumps against the cold bathroom wall.

 

-

 

“You’re dying.”

The tea in the kettle has gone cold. Kyungsoo brings his cup to his lips and contemplates how those words sound aloud. Not strange, he decides.

Junmyeon’s eyes are piercing and frantic. He repeats himself, louder this time. Kyungsoo nods.

“I am, aren’t I?” replies Kyungsoo.

He isn’t quite sure what happens after that. Junmyeon doesn’t leave for another hour or so. At times, he is silent. Then, he is launching into an angry spiel, shaking Kyungsoo’s shoulders until the tea cup in Kyungsoo’s hand falls and shatters.

Junmyeon doesn’t ever get angry. That is the oddest part, Kyungsoo thinks, mind going numb. He keeps nodding though.

“I am taking you to a goddamn doctor, Kyungsoo.”

Nod.

“Kyungsoo. What the  _fuck_. How could you—“

Nod.

Kyungsoo doesn’t have the answers Junmyeon is looking for. He doesn’t know how to voice thoughts that he hasn’t himself been able to make sense of. The thoughts aren’t tangible. They swim, even now, incoherently below his conscious mind.

Maybe I was curious, hyung. Maybe I wanted to know how it would feel like. You know. To die.

Kyungsoo isn’t sad, though. This is the intangible part. Kyungsoo doesn’t crave death because he hates life.

Kyungsoo is just a writer, with every writer’s bad habit—the itching desire to comprehend even the things we are not supposed to.

 

-

 

// 2013.

“Feel up for an adventure?” Jongin asks.

This is how Kyungsoo ends up at Namsan Tower that night, shuffling into a cable car. The place is busy with tourists but they are alone in the car. Jongin has his camera dangling from his neck. It looks heavy and obtrusive but Jongin sports it like an accessory, as if it completes him.

The car lurches forward. Kyungsoo tucks his hands into his hoodie, toes pressed right up against the glass. He hears the camera click. When he turns around, the lens is pointed at him.

“What’re you snapping?” he says.

Jongin lowers the camera. He blinks a few times. “The city,” he replies, and looks away.

Kyungsoo hums. “You’ve never taken the cable car before?”

“I take it all the time,” Jongin says. The streetlights are reflected in his black eyes. “Want to hear my secret?”

Kyungsoo shrugs.

“Seoul is my favourite place to photograph.”

He bends down to take a picture. Kyungsoo watches him frame his shot. Cities are pretty at night. Kyungsoo likes the city best like this, soaring above it and watching it breathe beneath him. Jongin has the camera lifted to his face, mouth pressed in a hard line.

“But I’m never satisfied with my pictures of Seoul,” Jongin continues. He pulls back to adjust his settings and tries again. The shutter clicks in rapid succession. “I feel like I don’t have any good shots to make a photobook that would do this place justice. I mean, look at it.”

Kyungsoo is looking.

“You know that feeling you get as you stare at it?” Jongin says. He places a hand on the glass, as if trying to reach out to the lights below. “You know how art is about feeling? Well, I can’t capture that feeling in a photograph.”

He takes his hand back, and crosses the cable car so that they’re standing side by side, facing the same window. Jongin’s finger is poised on the shutter button.

“You can’t capture it with words either,” Kyungsoo says.

That pulls a dry laugh out of Jongin. “Does that mean we’ve both failed as artists then?”

“Sure,” Kyungsoo answers. He pushes his hair out of his eyes. Jongin is staring at him now, not the city. “But only because true artists are never satisfied with themselves. And if they are,” Kyungsoo shrugs slightly, “I don’t think they’re real artists.”

The end of the cable is approaching in the distance. He looks back down. “Maybe you aren’t satisfied with your photographs because Seoul is your home,” he tells Jongin. “It’s so much more to you than a picture.”

Jongin’s tongue slips between the folds of his mouth, as if trying to taste Kyungsoo’s words. “Yes,” Jongin says. “Much more.”

In the next moment, Kyungsoo draws in a breath, almost unconsciously, like he knew what was coming. Maybe he did. He can’t tell. But Jongin is grabbing his wrist, pulling him closer. The camera lens knocks his chest as he pushes forward into Jongin’s heat.

They kiss until the city disappears from beneath their feet. Jongin’s thumbs have slipped under Kyungsoo’s sweater, rubbing circles into his hipbone. Kyungsoo feels his chest burning, a lit match against his rapid heartbeat.

That feeling—some intense, crawling heat. A bright stroke of red across a paint canvas. Kyungsoo has no words. That feeling. Jongin is art in its most abstract, frustrating form.

The cable car comes to a stop. Jongin’s hands linger on Kyungsoo’s hips. Hesitant and warm. Kyungsoo tries to swallow to clear his throat, but his tongue is thick and dry.

Out in the fresh air, Jongin strays away to take some more pictures but he doesn’t stop to look through any of them.

 

-

 

Jongin’s apartment is unlocked again when Kyungsoo stops by the next week. He takes his shoes off neatly, places them on the mat, and then steps inside. It’s tidy for once. Jongin sits at the piano, one bare foot lifting and releasing the pedal.

The curtains are drawn. Jongin’s shoulders are slumped forward. Kyungsoo goes over to the window to let the light in. On the coffee table, he sees the letters.

“Jongin.”

Kyungsoo sets his bag down, and fits himself onto the piano bench. Jongin is tapping the keys tentatively, and out of rhythm.

“Jongin,” Kyungsoo says again. “Are you writing more letters?”

Jongin slides a finger down the black keys, the melody like crashing bells. He plants his hand on Kyungsoo’s thigh, poking the inner seam of Kyungsoo’s denim.

“Soojung broke up with me.”

“Oh,” says Kyungsoo. His stomach lurches, and he thinks about Soojung’s eyes as she’d looked at him over her coffee mug.  _I think I know_.

The heat from Jongin’s hand pools like spilt ink across Kyungsoo’s leg.

“Did she—“ Kyungsoo pauses, and pokes a piano key. “That’s sudden.”

“Yes. I suppose it was.”

“You suppose?”

“I don’t know.”

His hand hasn’t moved. Kyungsoo shifts. “Are you sad?”

The sunlight dips and rises through the window. “I’m sad that I’m not sad,” Jongin replies after a while, lower lip folded up between his teeth. He gives Kyungsoo’s thigh one last squeeze and then he pulls away, standing up from the piano bench. Kyungsoo follows him to the couch.

Jongin scoops the letters up from the coffee table, piling them neatly one on top of the other. Some of them are crumpled. He smooths those ones out futilely before stacking them with the rest.

“Who is Lu Han?”

Kyungsoo sucks in a breath as he asks, at once hope and dread swirling in his chest. He doesn’t think Jongin is going to answer him at first. Jongin bends back the corner of one of the letters, fidgeting.

“He runs this modest restaurant in Beijing with his family. Not much older than you, though he looks as young as a flower,” says Jongin. Kyungsoo watches the shape of his mouth as he speaks.  _Flower_. “He said he’d been to Korea. Liked it a lot. Would want to go back.”

Kyungsoo tilts his head, cataloguing the flux and flow of Jongin’s expression. It has the sort of conflicting, distant sadness that a person does not see very often, and that a writer, usually, only imagines. Kyungsoo swallows hard. Jongin clears his throat.

“I said I would—“ His voice catches, as if the words have piled up on themselves. “I told him I could… take him. If he wanted to go with me.”

He’s staring down at one of the crumpled letters.

“He said that was too wishful.”

Kyungsoo runs a hand over his thigh. “Did you photograph him?”

“He isn’t in the photobook,” answers Jongin. He leans an elbow on the coffee table and exhales, breath blowing the hair on his forehead. “I was afraid of sharing him.” He looks up at Kyungsoo, eyes dark. “I’m always afraid.”

Kyungsoo stares back and thinks about the city lights and the cable car and how alive he had felt, but only because the shadows had allowed him.

“Aren’t we all,” says Kyungsoo.

Later, when the sun is starting to set and Kyungsoo has re-written an entire three chapters in the middle of the novel, he packs up his things and walks himself to the door.

Jongin steps out of the kitchen, leaning against the wall as he watches Kyungsoo slip his shoes on.

“Why do you write letters that you don’t send?”

Jongin blinks, arms folded across his chest. “The same reason you write stories,” he says. He rubs the back of his neck. “I want to believe in a world that doesn’t exist.”

“But you don’t like writing.”

“I don’t. I’m not good at it.” His eyebrows furrow, and he presses together his thumb and index finger as if imagining a camera click. “I guess pictures are my words.”

 

-

 

// 2016.

It isn’t quite warm enough yet, but Kyungsoo takes his laptop to the patio of a coffee shop and writes as the breeze carries a chill across his exposed skin. He digs his chin into his scarf, and grips his plastic coffee cup for warmth. Junmyeon wouldn’t like it if he knew Kyungsoo wasn’t at home resting, but Kyungsoo had woken up all right today. At least, better than most days.

So he’d thrown his coat on and walked the few blocks to get out of his apartment, which has started to feel stuffy and stale and looks a bit like a trashed funeral with stray flower petals littering his bathroom and tucked, more often now, between his blankets and pillows.

Sometimes, there are a few in the living room. Kyungsoo decides he has to clean soon. Nothing feels more like death than flowers.

The final draft for his piece is due soon. He’s thrown together a rushed, poorly-edited ending that Junmyeon is sure to hate, but will be too nice to admit so Kyungsoo has to fix it. He taps his finger on the keyboard, inhaling the cold, staring at the blinking cursor on the blank document.

The breeze comes along again. He sees a man by the curb, clad all-black. Slacks, shiny dress shoes, blazer flying loosely in the wind. The man turns, profile against the grey sky. He catches Kyungsoo’s eyes.

“You’re in a different neighbourhood,” Kyungsoo says, when Jongin takes the seat across from him. The chair scrapes against the pavement. Jongin slides in slowly, lethargic. His face is paler.

“I know,” Jongin says. He places his hands on the table. “How are you liking the photobook?”

“Paris? I haven’t opened it.”

Jongin nods at the laptop between them. “Almost finished?”

“Sort of, not really.” Kyungsoo offers him his coffee. He looks like he needs it. Jongin sips it carefully. Their legs bump as Kyungsoo shifts, but Jongin feels very far away.

He’s wearing a tie, loosened at the top, and collar unbuttoned. Overdressed for a Saturday morning. He finishes the coffee, and Kyungsoo lets him. He doesn’t speak after that. Kyungsoo goes back to his draft.

After a long time, Jongin has hooked his feet with Kyungsoo’s under the table. Kyungsoo looks up. Jongin’s Adam’s apple is bobbing, mouth turned down at the edges.

“I came back from Europe to attend a funeral,” Jongin tells him, though Kyungsoo hadn’t asked. He pulls his feet back.

“Have you gone already?” Kyungsoo doesn’t know what else he is supposed to say.

“Yes. It just finished.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?” says Jongin.

“For your loss.”

“Oh. Yes.” There’s a crease between his eyebrows again, tense, but his tone is soft. Aloft, Kyungsoo decides, as if his head is floating somewhere in the air above them. A cable car over a city. He’s here, but he isn’t.

“I’m sorry, I never should have—“ Jongin says suddenly. His hands shake. Kyungsoo frowns. Jongin is babbling now. “Instead of leaving… That day, I think… maybe I should have stayed—“

“You’re reminiscing,” Kyungsoo cuts in. “That’s not good for you.” He knows which day. That day between their birthdays. It feels too long ago to have to care about.

Jongin leans into the curve of his chair, throwing his head back until his neck is parallel with the sky. “Funerals have a way of doing that,” he murmurs, voice thin. “Pulling up old ghosts.”

“That’s morbid. Don’t say that.”

Jongin laughs in reply, dry and hollow. It sounds more like an exhale. A ghost of a laugh itself. Kyungsoo’s spine crawls with a cold shiver. He pulls his scarf up to his nose.

“It was Lu Han’s,” Jongin says.

There’s a jolt of pain in Kyungsoo’s neck when he snaps his head up. “What?”

“The funeral, I mean.” Jongin lifts his arm, raising it into the air. It looks like he is trying to touch the clouds.

Kyungsoo stares at him, eyes wide, heart hammering. “Jongin—“

“He really was a flower. Pretty. Delicate,” Jongin is speaking to himself. At least, it seems so. Soft whispers for his own heart. “His car crashed. He’d just landed in Seoul. He was… going to open a restaurant.” Kyungsoo barely hears him over the breeze. He watches him carefully. This is what it looks like to break, Kyungsoo thinks, as Jongin’s shoulders slump limply.

Kyungsoo needs to cough. He holds it in.

“If you leave a flower unintended, it will die,” Jongin continues to whisper. This is what it looks like to break. Like a crumpled azalea petal, crushed in a clenched fist. “They’re terrible like that. Flowers, I mean. Beautiful. And terrible.”


	3. Chapter 3

// January 2014.

The day after Kyungsoo’s birthday is the day before Jongin’s. They go out to Hongdae and walk around and eat some food and later, Kyungsoo buys them a case of beer and they head back to his apartment.

He turns the television on and Jongin takes the beer and cracks one open, and both of them are too lazy to move to the couch so they sit on the floor, leaning their backs against the coffee table.

Jongin says, “Let’s toast.”

“To what?” Kyungsoo takes a can for himself.

“Your debut novel hitting #1 on the bestseller list.”

Kyungsoo scoffs, but they tap their drinks together and chug down anyways.

“Did I help?”

“Hmm?”

“As your muse,” says Jongin. “Did I bring your pianist to life?”

Kyungsoo shrugs lazily and doesn’t answer him.

“You wrote him as me, didn’t you, hyung?” He stares at Kyungsoo earnestly, arms propped up on his folded knees, beer can hanging from his fingers between his legs.

“Whatever you say,” Kyungsoo mumbles.

They watch the television in silence for a while, making their way through the whole six-pack until Jongin has settled his head onto Kyungsoo’s lap, hiccupping and muttering nonsense.

The eleven o’clock news glazes over them both. Kyungsoo’s head feels heavy. He slumps forward and Jongin reaches up his arms and catches Kyungsoo’s face with both hands.

“Sleepy hyung,” he murmurs. “Are you sleepy?”

“I’m drunk, dumbass.”

“Mmm, me too.” Jongin sits up and leans Kyungsoo on his shoulder. Jongin’s long piano fingers find Kyungsoo’s wrist, and he traces patterns into the skin as he hums that Tchaikovsky piece under his breath.

“Oh Kyungsoo-hyung,” whispers Jongin. “What am I going to do with you?”

The room tilts beneath them, the edges of Kyungsoo’s consciousness blurring into some sort of cloudy mess. Distant city lights, like stars that don’t make constellations. A paint-splattered canvas. Nothing makes sense. All he can feel is Jongin’s warmth, his fingers holding his wrist, the buzz of Jongin’s body as he hums.

Jongin whispers, “What am I to do, hyung?”

Kyungsoo has no idea what he is saying. He suspects Jongin must not know either. He turns his wrist over and laces his own fingers with Jongin’s. Then he shifts his head, looks up at him through his eyelashes.

Kyungsoo measures his gaze, the tense crease of his forehead. Jongin’s lips are parted, moving uselessly and incoherently. The alcohol washes over them both as Kyungsoo pushes forward and presses a chaste, kitten-lick kiss to the corner of Jongin’s mouth.

He pulls back again, a beat later, to study Jongin’s face.

“Hyung.” Jongin runs a shaky finger along Kyungsoo’s jawline, eyes clouded.

“Hmm?”

“I’m selfish, aren’t I, hyung?”

“Stop talking,” Kyungsoo breathes and moves into Jongin’s lap.

“But hyung. I want to—“

“Me too,” says Kyungsoo and cups Jongin’s cheeks with his palms. “Me too.”

Jongin groans when their lips meet again. His hands slip up and under Kyungsoo’s sweater and Kyungsoo pulls back to let him take it off. Their tongues get caught up in the bitter taste of beer, clinging to the roof of their mouths.

Jongin moves down to run his mouth across Kyungsoo’s collarbones and Kyungsoo sucks in a sharp breath. It’s not nearly enough, is all he can process, and he whines against the shell of Jongin’s ear, rolling his hips down.

Kyungsoo wraps his arms around Jongin’s neck. Jongin hoists him up, backing blindly through the apartment, and down the hall to the bedroom. He plants Kyungsoo on the bed gently, crawling up over him on his knees.

“Take—“ Kyungsoo swallows. Jongin kisses his beating pulse point. “Your clothes—“ Kyungsoo pulls at Jongin’s sweatshirt, and Jongin steps back to undress them both.

Their limbs are a mess, bodies tangled in each other’s heat. Jongin spreads Kyungsoo’s legs slowly and carefully and Kyungsoo digs his nails into the skin of Jongin’s back.

“ _ _Jongin__ _—_ “ Kyungsoo whines, gasps, pleads.

He pulls Kyungsoo’s body into his as he collapses onto the bed beside him. He tugs the blanket over them as their breathing settles. The edges of Kyungsoo’s tilted, blurry consciousness get hazier and hazier as Jongin plays gently with Kyungsoo’s hair, planting a final kiss on his head.

It’s a sad kiss. Soft and lingering. It tells of goodbyes and endings, but right now, it simply lulls Kyungsoo to sleep.

“Kyungsoo-hyung,” says Jongin’s distant voice, echoing in Kyungsoo’s dreams with their heartbeats. “Hyung is so beautiful, do you know that? You probably don’t.”

Sleep takes Kyungsoo away, although at what point, Kyungsoo doesn’t know. He thinks he hears Jongin humming Tchaikovsky again but it might just be his mind, inebriated and tired.

“I’m selfish. I think I might break you.”

In the morning, Kyungsoo finds Jongin in the kitchen. He’s pouring them each a mug of coffee. Kyungsoo takes a seat at the table, and slices his pancake tentatively.

Jongin puts the empty coffee cup in the sink, and runs the tap over it. He’s put on his pants but not yet his shirt. The morning sun paints him through the kitchen window. Kyungsoo’s throat is dry as he drinks.

The night before is a long-lost memory, a dream, Kyungsoo would think, if it weren’t for the dull, throbbing pain between his legs. Jongin turns around and leans against the counter with his mug. The steam glides across his face.

“Good morning.”

“Hmm,” Kyungsoo nods and presses his fork to his mouth.

Jongin taps his finger along the handle of the mug, as if waiting for the right time to say something more. Last night comes to Kyungsoo in flashes, distant flashes, like they are someone else’s memories.

But there is still that loose, jelly feeling to Kyungsoo’s legs. The ghost of Jongin’s kisses tingling his body like flames, singed hot, imprinted to his skin. And there, Jongin stands, peering at him in fleeting glances. Hair ruffled and pants wrinkled.

And this makes Kyungsoo’s heart pound more than the alcohol. More than the open kisses on his neck. That, Kyungsoo realizes, is the scariest part of it all.

Jongin sets his cup down, and crosses the kitchen in two large strides. Kyungsoo blinks up at him.

“Jong—“

He kisses him, harder and a little insistent, all proper and chaste, square on his lips. Kyungsoo stares, eyebrows furrowed. Jongin is touching his jaw again, gently, very gently. And then he places one more kiss to Kyungsoo’s forehead.

They eat their breakfast quietly. Jongin eats very slowly. He washes both their plates, and heads into the bedroom to dress.

That day, Jongin leaves for Paris.

 

-

 

// 2016.

“The cure is to forget.”

Kyungsoo trains his eyes on the shiny hardwood. It’s a very clean doctor’s office. Rather unnervingly so. Kyungsoo has never liked doctors’ offices.

“Kyungsoo.”

He picks at a stray piece of thread sprouting up from the fabric of his chair. It rips out of its seam.

“ _Kyungsoo_.”

He turns his head. Junmyeon. Eyes wide. Junmyeon is staring at him pointedly. Kyungsoo blinks.

“Ah. Yes,” he looks to the doctor, who has his finger poised on the touch screen monitor. “Go on. I’m listening.” It’s got all sorts of diagrams on it. The doctor slides left on the screen and Kyungsoo sees the X-rays of his own heart and lungs.

He knows it’s his lungs because of the dark outline in the center. He feels Junmyeon stiffen beside him.

“The flower is getting dangerously large, Do-ssi.” The screen expands. If Kyungsoo squints, he can make out the individual petals. It looks very pretty, Kyungsoo thinks. “A few more weeks, and it will be blocking your airway completely. If you want to live, it needs to be extracted right away.”

Junmyeon scoots up on his chair. “You were talking about a cure just now?”

The doctor takes his glasses off, hands planted flat on his desk. “We believe we have determined the cause,” his eyes float to Kyungsoo and then back again. “And the surgery has been tested. We can get that flower out of him.”

 

-

 

The words echo in Kyungsoo’s ears for the whole day. In retrospect, maybe for much longer. He tries to escape them, but nothing can drown out the sounds of the blood pumping in his veins. Forget. Forget. Forget. The cure is to forget.

Junmyeon drives him home, chewing his lower lip in quiet concern. Kyungsoo leans his head against the window, breath fogging the glass.

“One-sided love,” Kyungsoo mutters softly. Junmyeon’s gaze flits when Kyungsoo speaks. “One-sided love.” His tone is hollow and sharp. He can feel Junmyeon trying to study the level of his voice.

“You heard the doctor, right, Junmyeon-hyung?” Kyungsoo says again. “The flower grows out of one-sided love.” He chuckles, watching his breath fan out thickly on the window glass. His laugh is short and makes his insides feel cold and frozen. “Glorious, isn’t it? Doesn’t it sound just gloriously tragic?”

Junmyeon doesn’t say anything. They’re at a stoplight. His knuckles are clenched white on the steering wheel.

“Don’t look so rigid, hyung,” murmurs Kyungsoo. “You’re aging yourself.”

“I’m sorry, Kyungsoo.”

“Oh don’t apologize. You’re still handsome.”

Junmyeon sighs. “I’m serious, Kyungsoo. I’m sorry that there’s no other option.”

“I could just die.” Kyungsoo draws a smiley face into the window, where his breath had fogged up. “That’s even more gloriously tragic.”

“Now is not the time to be a writer.”

“Of course, hyung,” Kyungsoo replies. “Don’t let me romanticize.”

The light turns green and Junmyeon drives forward.

“You know why writers are terrible people?” says Kyungsoo. He sits up in his seat, and adjusts his seatbelt. Junmyeon is glancing at him wearily. “We want—we  _ _need__ —to understand every. Human. Emotion.” He pokes the dashboard accordingly. “And when we don’t, that’s scary to us. Because how then, do we write what he can’t understand?”

Junmyeon wets his lips. “Whoever it is, you won’t forget who they are. Just…”

“That I was ever in love with them,” Kyungsoo says. “I know.”

They turn onto Kyungsoo’s street. His apartment building comes into view, sitting against the skyline. “Are you going to talk to her?” Junmyeon asks hesitantly.

“Who?”

“The person. You know. Whoever it is.”

Kyungsoo runs his tongue against the back of his teeth, and says nothing.

“I suggest you do,” Junmyeon finishes. “The flower dies on its own if the person loves you back.”

“Mmm,” says Kyungsoo. There isn’t anything else to say. “Yeah. We’ll see.”

He coughs into his palm and keeps the petals clenched in his fists so he won’t dirty Junmyeon’s car. And then he wonders, fleetingly and not aloud, how strange it will feel to be able to breathe again. He wonders if his lungs will feel lighter. His chest. His heart.

Is it a  _cure_  to forget?

Maybe it doesn’t matter. He will stop suffocating.

 

-

 

The day before the surgery, Kyungsoo goes to Jongin’s apartment. He doesn’t know what possesses him, what carries him there. It’s too late to try and figure it out. The door pulls open. The apartment looks the same, if not a little emptier.

“I would offer you tea but I figure it wouldn’t taste as good as what you’re used to,” Jongin says.

“That’s okay.” Kyungsoo folds his legs on the couch, sinking into the cushions as if he’d never left. The piano bench is pushed back, like Jongin had been playing before Kyungsoo had arrived.

Jongin brews him tea. Kyungsoo swallows it. He’s right, it doesn’t taste very good but he drinks it anyways.

“You look pale, hyung.” Jongin sits on the coffee table. “Even paler than before.”

The words almost slip out, one thing piled over the other. Jongin looks like the way he did that day he’d left for Paris. Maybe his shoulders are a little broader. His hair is shorter. But it’s him. That Jongin who had stood in Kyungsoo’s kitchen with the morning light blazing a trail across the lines of his face and body. It might be that moment, among many, that Kyungsoo could say the flower started to bloom inside his lungs.

The words are on Kyungsoo’s lips, poised and ready. I’m dying because of you.

“Lack of sleep.”

Jongin lifts an eyebrow. Kyungsoo exhales. “Deadlines are coming up. I’m not sick,” he insists.

Jongin nods slowly. The walls of the apartment feel like they’re narrowing. Kyungsoo can’t breathe. He smells Jongin’s cologne. Suffocating. It’s the flowers in his throat. It’s Jongin. Flowers and Jongin. It’s all the same.

Kyungsoo excuses himself rather abruptly, and thanks Jongin for the tea.

“I really—“ he stops himself at the door, once he’s put his shoes back on. Jongin blinks at him. “Thank you, Jongin.”

There’s a locking motion at Jongin’s jaw. His muscles twitch. Kyungsoo has to clench his fists, resist the urge to cup his face.

“The tea…” Kyungsoo’s voice catches. He tastes azaleas. “I really loved the tea. Even though it was terrible and not very pleasant. I really loved… it. If it wasn’t so… bad, I would drink more. I really would.”

“Hyung,” Jongin says. “What are you—“

“Thank you for everything. I wouldn’t change the tea. Even the smallest things. I wouldn’t do it over again, even if I could.”

He leaves quickly after that. His mind pulses with too many thoughts. He coughs an endless shower of petals when he gets home.

Kyungsoo wishes his story were braver. Maybe in another life, a re-written version, he doesn’t run away from it all. He can only wonder. He lets himself wonder. It doesn’t matter anyways. By tomorrow, he’ll forget it all.

 

-

 

// 2012.

Kyungsoo falls asleep, against his better judgement. It’s not a good idea to take a nap with a man in his apartment, who is just barely above a stranger. He can’t decide if he regrets letting Jongin read a bit of his draft. It feels too personal. Jongin’s smile sets him on edge so he tries not to think too hard about it and tears his eyes away from his mouth. He can still feel Jongin’s stupid kiss on his lips.

He puts his laptop away and glances at the clock. Baekhyun hasn’t called. He might not come around until nighttime, so Kyungsoo curls up on the couch as Jongin flicks through his TV channels.

 

-

 

“Hyung, are you asleep?” Jongin pokes Kyungsoo with the remote. Kyungsoo breathes quietly, evenly.

“You’re asleep, aren’t you?”

He watches Kyungsoo’s dark eyelashes flutter with every breath. Softly, he places his hand on Kyungsoo’s forehead. Kyungsoo’s nose scrunches and then settles again. His skin is soft and smooth.

Jongin lowers the volume on the television. Watching Kyungsoo sleep is peaceful, like the hum of a distant piano melody in his chest. He rubs his thumb tentatively across Kyungsoo’s cheekbone. There is a quiet beauty, Jongin decides, to Kyungsoo in slumber. It leaves Jongin with that quiet rush of adrenaline, the kind he gets in the short moment between framing a shot and pressing the shutter button. A subtle, fleeting calm.

“I sort of want to kiss you more,” Jongin whispers, but only the apartment can hear him, and the four walls of his own heart. “What’re the chances, do you think, of you wanting that too?”

Kyungsoo breathes on silently in reply.

“Yeah. I haven’t figured it out either.”

 

-

 

// April 2016.

For three days after the surgery, Kyungsoo drifts in and out of sleep. The first time he wakes, he is alone. The window in his hospital room is propped open to let in some air.

A breeze comes through, the modest kind that tickles the hair on his arm but doesn’t do much else. It rustles the thin yellow curtain, soft sunlight refracting through the translucent fabric, and cutting a path towards his bed. Sleep takes him again.

His blankets are changed, his arms are poked and when the nurse opens his hospital gown to check his surgery wound, Kyungsoo gets a brief glimpse of the thick bandages wrapped around his chest. He sleeps once more.

 

-

 

The next time he wakes, Junmyeon is standing at his bedside along with his mother. The doctor comes in a moment later with a nurse, who sets up a tray of food and helps him sit up so he can eat.

His throat feels strange when he swallows. The food slides down through his system, cool and easy. He touches his Adams’ apple. The nurse looks at him, concerned.

“Something wrong, Do-ssi?” She bends down, and frowns.

“I—no,” he says. He inhales—full, deep. The window in the room is open again. The fresh air floods down his lungs like a waterfall. “Not at all, actually.”

“That’s good to hear,” the doctor smiles at him. It’s the same doctor he had met the first time with Junmyeon. “You’re recovering well. No memory loss, right?”

Kyungsoo pokes the batch of peas on his tray. He scans the faces in the room. “Junmyeon-hyung. My mother,” he says.

“Good. That’s good.” The doctor says more things afterwards, but Kyungsoo isn’t really listening. His body feels light, unnaturally so, as if his bones are hollow or something equally strange.

Then the nurse and the doctor leave, closing the door behind them. His mother touches his arm gently. “Junmyeon-ssi told me what happened,” she says. Her voice is a little hard—a true mother’s tone, reprimanding just the slightest—but her eyes are soft.

Kyungsoo glances at Junmyeon. “She had to know, Kyungsoo,” Junmyeon tells him.

“Of course,” says Kyungsoo.

His mother sighs, squeezing his arm a little tightly. “Kyungsoo. You should have—“ She stops herself. Kyungsoo reaches out to touch her hand but the IV drip doesn’t let him. “This is not something you should have hidden.”

“I know.” He smiles at her, to soothe her.

He does remember the doctor telling him he was going to die. But Kyungsoo feels fine now. Better than fine. He feels light and airy.

 

-

 

Later that day, he is discharged. He thanks Junmyeon for taking care of him and then the three of them go out for an early dinner. Junmyeon is watching him a little wearily, out of the corner of his eye. Kyungsoo doesn’t know how to reassure him so he just keeps smiling at him, but that only seems to worry Junmyeon even more.

In the bathroom, Junmyeon walks in a moment after Kyungsoo. He stares at him through the mirror. “You sure you’re alright?” he asks.

Kyungsoo shoots him another smile. “Hyung. I feel great.” He turns the tap on and runs water over his hands, reaching under his nails to scrape out any dirt. “Better than I have in ages.”

“It’s only been three days since the surgery,” Junmyeon points out. “You were coughing flowers just last week.”

“And now I’m not,” Kyungsoo says, tersely. Junmyeon’s mouth thins out. Kyungsoo shakes his hands dry and rips a paper towel from the dispenser. He studies his reflection. There’s colour in his cheeks. “I can’t even remember…” he murmurs.

Junmyeon’s eyebrow quirks. Kyungsoo shakes his head. “Well. I sort of remember. I remember… hurting.” Faintly, he touches his hand to the mirror. The pads of his fingers curl into the glass.

“But I can’t remember  _ _why__  it hurt so much. Only that it hurt.” He exhales softly and drops his hand. Junmyeon is staring at him intensely. Kyungsoo smiles again. “But not anymore, of course.”

“If you say so,” says Junmyeon.

Kyungsoo’s reflection seems very far away—staring at himself, but surprised with the image that stares back. Not a bad surprise. He looks as good as he feels.

“You don’t feel the same,” Junmyeon says again.

Kyungsoo turns to look at him. Junmyeon leans his hip onto the counter.

“I know,” Kyungsoo replies, stepping forward earnestly. “I said I’m  _better_.”

“You keep smiling.”

Did Kyungsoo not smile before this? He sighs quietly and looks away. Junmyeon means well. He always means well. And Kyungsoo doesn’t want to argue.

He stares up at the bathroom lights. The lightbulbs are bright white, burning his pupils for a moment. A faint knocking pounds his head, transitory and distant. A few words slip between his lips before he knows he is saying them.

“The cure… is to forget.”

Junmyeon frowns. “What?”

Kyungsoo blinks, squeezing his eyelids shut. The lights disappear. Then he re-opens his eyes. His bones feel light and airy again. He exhales and the tension flows out of his shoulders. “Nothing,” he says, smiling. “Just some old ghost thoughts.”

 

-

 

// September 2016.

Summer passes simply and pleasantly. The first thing Kyungsoo does at the start of the season is hand over the rights to  _Labyrinth_  to Lionsgate and by the end of August, all the paperwork had been cleared and sorted. The film adaptation is green lit for an early 2018 premiere.

Junmyeon takes care of the technical work. Kyungsoo agrees to do a couple interviews, but no book tours please. The dates are scheduled. A mini congratulatory party is set in Junmyeon’s apartment, at his insistence, but Kyungsoo doesn’t put up a fight.

It’s a modest guest list. Kyungsoo shows up to see a few friends from the publishing house, his mother and also Chanyeol, who had flown in from New York early to spend Chuseok with his parents.

“Your mother invited me,” Chanyeol says, as he pours Kyungsoo a glass of wine in the kitchen. “Your editor lives in a penthouse. Jeez.”

Junmyeon’s apartment is open and spacious, but it’s on the side of the city that Kyungsoo doesn’t usually bother to visit. Chanyeol hands him the glass.

“Never thought you’d say yes to a film,” he comments blandly. Kyungsoo shrugs and clinks his glass against Chanyeol’s. “Congrats.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“Why the change of heart?”

Kyungsoo snorts. The white wine is sweet and fruity. “You sound like Junmyeon,” he sighs. Junmyeon had stared at Kyungsoo dubiously when Kyungsoo had told him he could go ahead with the project.

“I just feel like it,” Kyungsoo had said, “Whatever.” He tells Chanyeol the same thing now. Chanyeol just laughs and ruffles his hair, and doesn’t say anything else which Kyungsoo likes. They pour themselves more wine and talk about Chanyeol’s art for a while, until Junmyeon comes in.

“Uh. Kyungsoo?” he says.

Junmyeon’s face is a little blanched, deep creases rippling his forehead.

“What’s wrong, hyung?”

“There’s—uh. Byun Baekhyun is kind of in my living room?”

“ _Byun Baekhyun_?” Chanyeol smacks his glass on the counter top. “Isn’t he a pop star?”

Kyungsoo frowns. “Oh. Yes. I might have mentioned the project to him a while ago,” he says. Junmyeon looks thoroughly bemused. “Sorry, I didn’t know he’d just show up. Maybe my mom told him about it. Do you want him to leave? I could kick him out, no worries.”

“No! No, I mean—“ Junmyeon pulls at his collar, and throws Kyungsoo a look. “Why do you have to keep secrets, Kyungsoo? You never told me you two were friends!”

“Secrets keep a man relevant,” Kyungsoo teases casually, setting his wine glass in the sink and steps out of the kitchen, into the living room.

Baekhyun is sitting politely on the couch, legs crossed, next to Kyungsoo’s mother. He looks like he’s in the middle of a story, waving his arms about as he charms the whole room.

“Kyungsoo! Congratulations!”

The guests claps for Kyungsoo as he enters but Baekhyun is always the centre of attention, even at a party that isn’t for him and he wasn’t really invited to. Kyungsoo doesn’t mind having someone to hide behind though. Baekhyun never gets tired of talking.

“So guess what, Soo?” Baekhyun says cutely when the food has been laid out and everyone is piling their plates up in the dining area. “I told my agency I wanted the lead in your movie.”

“Oh, lovely. The film is going to flop.”

Baekhyun gives Kyungsoo’s arm a playful pinch. “I know you’re secretly excited, it’s okay. Express your gratitude to me later when it sells out the box office.”

The doorbell rings. Junmyeon looks up from his plate and wipes his hands on a napkin. “Are we expecting more people?” he muses. He peers at Kyungsoo across the room, but Kyungsoo shrugs indifferently.

Junmyeon disappears out into the foyer to answer the door. It’s quiet for a moment. The door clicks closed. Then footsteps.

“Kyungsoo?” Junmyeon calls, poking his head back into the dining area. “There’s a guy here that says he’s your friend.”

Baekhyun’s eyebrows quirk, curious. He looks at Kyungsoo, inquiringly. Kyungsoo shakes his head, confused, but steps out anyways.

“Hyung.”

Kyungsoo blinks. He processes the sight slowly. “Kim Jongin?” he says.

Jongin is dressed down in jeans and a leather jacket. His hands are stuffed awkwardly in his pockets. “Hi… hyung,” he replies. “It’s been a while.”

Hyung. Kyungsoo considers the word. He doesn’t exactly remember when Jongin started calling him that. Has it always been that way? “Yeah. What are you, um, doing here?”

Jongin swallows thickly in his throat. He looks rigid and out of place.

Kyungsoo pauses for an answer. Jongin licks his lips. “Chanyeol told me you’d be here,” he replies. “So. I came.”

“Okay?” Kyungsoo doesn’t mean to sound dismissive, and he regrets it a little when he sees Jongin’s expression. Kyungsoo glances past him, to the open balcony doors. “Want to talk outside?”

“Sure.” The balcony is large and has a small, glass table and wooden chairs. Neither of them sit down. They lean their arms on the railing. The sky is blue today. Kyungsoo watches the clouds move.

“Congratulations,” Jongin says.

“Thank you.”

The laughter from the party floats from inside, towards them, very faintly. Maybe Baekhyun is telling another joke.

“I didn’t think you would ever hand over your novel to a film director,” Jongin comments. He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulls out his cigarettes.

“Yeah,” Kyungsoo says. He runs a finger along the metal railing. “You’re not the first person to tell me that.”

Jongin makes a vague noise. He’s patting himself down for a lighter, Kyungsoo presumes. When he finds it, he flicks it open but the wind kills the flame a few times. “I re-read your first novel, you know. A couple months ago,” he says. “Remember hyung? You wrote that one about me.”

He cups his hand around the lighter then slips it back into his pocket. His shoulders fall forward, elbows perched at the edges of the railing, arms dangling in the open sky. Kyungsoo stares at his fingers.

“I… did,” Kyungsoo murmurs. A story about a pianist.

Jongin’s always had pretty fingers. Kyungsoo watches him exhale his smoke, long and lazy. “Where have you been lately?” Jongin asks. He fidgets idly with the cigarette. Kyungsoo can smell the smoke. It’s sharp and thick as he inhales it.

He touches his throat absently, trying to remember what the flower petals had felt like, growing in his lungs.

He tries to remember. He can’t.

“I had surgery,” Kyungsoo says. He rocks back and forth on his heels. The both of them only have their socks on. Kyungsoo feels rocks digging into his feet. “Actually, only Junmyeon-hyung knows this. And my mom.”

He curls his toes. They wriggle into the ground. “You won’t make a big deal out of it, right?” he says, smiling thinly. “It’s hard to tell people you care about, about stuff like that.”

“You  _were_  sick.”

Kyungsoo looks up. Jongin is studying him intently.

“Was it bad?” Jongin presses. “How are you now?”

“I feel perfect now,” replies Kyungsoo. He shifts his weight, leaning over the railing to peer at the city. It looks different than it does at night, from up in a cable car.

“Do you know what it was?” Kyungsoo says. He laces his fingers together. “It was that flower-thing that’s been all over the news.”

Jongin drops his cigarette. It escapes his fingers, tumbles off the side of the balcony. Kyungsoo follows the path of its fall, until it disappears. “Hanahaki,” Jongin says, hollowly.

Kyungsoo lifts an eyebrow. “Yeah, that.”

“The love flowers?” Jongin’s fists clench.

Kyungsoo tilts his head. “The  _ _one-sided__  love flowers.”

The shift in Jongin’s black eyes is slight—burning, but gone in a blink. It’s as if Kyungsoo is staring into a past that doesn’t belong to him. Cable cars. Nighttime. Beer. The memories are dull and muffled, coming to him in snapshots submerged in water.

“It was you, I was in love with, wasn’t it?” Kyungsoo says. Lightly, his finger traces the shape of his collarbone through his shirt. He smiles at Jongin again, withering. “It must have been. Or else I wouldn’t have written a book about you.”

Writers always fall in love with their characters, Kyungsoo thinks. They need to, to be able to write them. Jongin’s hair flutters in the wind, eyes wide and unblinking. Words start and die on his lips all in one instant as he tries to speak.

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not in love with you anymore,” Kyungsoo interjects. He laughs soft and short under his breath, turning towards the city again. “I never will be. That’s how the surgery works. When the flower gets extracted, so does the attraction. Forever, I guess.”

“What if I loved you back?” Jongin says, sharp and sudden. He moves closer, though Kyungsoo smells the smoke off of him first before he actually sees him.

“Then…” Kyungsoo leans back onto the railing. Jongin is pressing him into the glass. The open air grazes the back of Kyungsoo’s neck. “I imagine the flower never would have grown in the first place.”

Jongin’s mouth opens and shuts, as if he is searching for a different answer. “Hypothetically, if I  _did._ ” He grabs Kyungsoo by the wrists, and Kyungsoo falters. “Why would the flower still grow?”

He sounds frantic. Maybe sad, Kyungsoo thinks, but he doesn’t dwell on assumptions. Mostly, Jongin looks confused. Kyungsoo isn’t sure what to say. He wants to give Jongin the answer he wants to hear but he doesn’t know what it is. “I—well—I… don’t know,” Kyungsoo admits. He glances down, to where his hands have turned white from Jongin’s grip. “Did you ever tell me?”

The grip loosens. “What?”

Kyungsoo pulls his arms back and rubs the sore skin. They’re red with Jongin’s finger marks. He shrugs, considering. “Did you ever, hypothetically, tell me that you loved me?”

Jongin’s expression changes like the wind—Kyungsoo feels it more than he sees it.

The memories are there. Kyungsoo feels them too. They swim somewhere on the distant edges of his consciousness. He knows they are there. He dreams, sometimes, of Seoul at night. Floating above it, filled with adrenaline. He always wakes with a shiver, and the dream always escapes him.

 

-

 

// 2014. Paris.

Jongin meets him again in the 7th _arrondissement_  on Avenue de La Motte-Picquet, outside a pleasant restaurant with a sidewalk patio. He spots Jongin first, sitting down at Jongin’s table with the shortest of hellos, then talks endlessly about little things and how much fun Europe has been, and Jongin says nothing until his heartbeat stops buzzing. It does stop buzzing, eventually.

Lu Han smiles. He fits right in, Jongin thinks. All the smoothness of Paris—its quietly vibrant charm—is reflected in Lu Han’s eyes. They’re the sort of eyes that twinkle constantly, and remind you of stars even in the daytime.

“I’m going to fly to Korea next week,” Lu Han explains. He’d saved up enough to fly out and travel some. Jongin snaps in and out of the conversation. “Remember my friend Yixing? He went ahead of me but I’m going to join him and help him run his restaurant there.”

“That’s nice,” Jongin says, genuinely.

“Nice?” Lu Han’s laugh rings out, delicate. It makes a few people from the other table look over. “You have nothing more to say to me anymore?”

Jongin shakes his head. “It’s not that,” he says, taking his camera off his neck and placing it on the table. “Just—never mind.”

Lu Han purses his lips. “Hmm.” He snags Jongin’s camera before Jongin has the chance to stop him, batting his eyes sweetly when Jongin doesn’t make a move to take it back. Lu Han pushes the dial. The camera clicks on.

“You look like you’ve left a part of yourself in Seoul, Jongin,” he says, voice dipping just the slightest so it sounds teasing, but he glances up as he says it, to watch Jongin’s reaction.

“Well, don’t you leave a little of yourself in Beijing?” Jongin replies. Lu Han is sifting through his pictures now.

“Yes, but I’m not running from anything,” Lu Han murmurs, and Jongin swallows thickly but doesn’t retort. Lu Han isn’t someone you argue with. He talks at you, and if you didn’t agree with him when he started, you’ll end up agreeing with him when he ends.

Jongin crosses his arms. The foam on his coffee has melted down a little.

“Who’s this?” Lu Han asks, turning the screen towards him.

Jongin lifts the cup off the saucer and sips it. “A… writer,” he says shortly.

Lu Han leans back in his chair and stares at the picture again. Jongin licks foam off his lips.

“Wow. You’ve snapped quite a few—“

“Okay, playtime over,” Jongin sighs and reclaims his camera. Kyungsoo’s face on the little screen smiles back at him. He shuts it off.

Lu Han pauses for a second, and then grins. “Fine,” he stands up from his seat and leaves a few euros under his napkin. His figure blocks the sun as he drapes his coat over his shoulders. The light fans out behind his hair. “I’ll see you in Seoul, hopefully.”

“Yeah hopefully.” Jongin keeps waiting for the moment where he falls in love with Lu Han all over again. If it’s happened already, he can’t tell. Although he has a feeling Lu Han is the sort that everyone falls in love.

He clutches his camera a little tighter when Lu Han smiles again.

“Don’t keep people waiting, Jongin.”

He disappears around the street corner. Later that night in his hotel room, Jongin turns his camera back on—the glowing screen stinging his eyes in the dark until he falls asleep.

 

-

 

// January 2017. seoul.

Jongin wakes up in a sweat. It’s nighttime outside when he fumbles his way to the bathroom, and coughs dryly into the sink.

He rubs the sleep out of his eyes, and tastes blood on his tongue—thin, barely there. A faint iron flavour. He reaches for the light switch, running the tap.

He almost misses them as the water starts to flow. Flower petals circle down the drain. Two of them—tiny. White. Soft.

 

-

 

It starts to snow when Kyungsoo steps out of the studio and onto the streets. He and Baekhyun part ways at the front door. Baekhyun hugs his movie script under his coat, as Kyungsoo makes a half-hearted jibe at his acting skills.

“Shut up, author-nim,” Baekhyun retorts. “I’ll see you at the next table read.” His manager comes out a minute later to huddle him into his van, and Kyungsoo hails a taxi. He gets off a few blocks from his street, shaking snow off his hair.

The cold bites his skin so he buries his nose into his scarf as he walks, and shuffles into his apartment building. Then he stomps more snow out of his shoes on the doormat, unwrapping his scarf with a little sniffle. He usually doesn’t feel the cold so badly.

“Your nose is all red.”

Kyungsoo lifts his head. Jongin is sitting at the foot of the staircase, a wrapped parcel balanced on his knees.

“I knocked, but there was no answer. So I figured I’d just wait,” Jongin explains, standing up and brushing dirt off the back of his thighs.

“How long have you been waiting?” Kyungsoo asks, approaching him.

“I came by around ten.” Jongin’s hair has gotten longer. It falls into his eyes as he shrugs.

“ _Two_   _hours_?”

“It’s all right.”

They stand in silence, the cold from outside still thawing on Kyungsoo’s cheeks. Speaking to Jongin is like having a million questions, but not even knowing what the questions are.

“Are… you okay, Jongin?” Kyungsoo hasn’t seen him since the mini-party at Junmyeon’s place. Jongin had left rather abruptly. “You don’t look…  _okay_.”

“Okay?” Jongin repeats the word, as if trying to taste it. He gestures to the package in his hands. “I’m tired. I had to put this together for you on time so I was up a little late last night.” He clears his throat and holds it out. Kyungsoo steps forward to take it. “Happy birthday,” Jongin says.

He raises his arm, but then stops himself. It falls a moment later. “Sorry. There’s… some snowflakes in your hair.”

Kyungsoo runs his hand across the top of his head. The snow melts on his palm. He looks up at Jongin. “Do you want to come up?” he asks him.

“If that’s okay with you,” Jongin says stiffly. Kyungsoo tries to smile to diffuse whatever strange tension is in the air. He isn’t sure if it works, so he leads the way up the stairs and they climb up quietly.

Inside the apartment, Jongin toes his shoes off and places them off to the side like he’s been here countless times, and then Kyungsoo remembers that he has. They walk into the kitchen wordlessly and Jongin sits at the table, folding one leg.

He watches Kyungsoo hover around the cupboards. “Sorry,” Kyungsoo says, running water into the kettle by the stove. “I, uh, can’t remember if you like tea?”

His back is turned. Jongin’s pause is long. “Yes. I do,” he replies. “I like your tea, at least.”

Kyungsoo waits for the water to boil, then he sits across from Jongin and pours them each a cup. Jongin is playing with the bent edges of wrapping paper on his gift. Kyungsoo takes a breath.

“Should I open it?” he asks, pulling the package towards him. Jongin gives him what is probably a thin smile, so Kyungsoo unwraps it carefully. He pulls away the paper, trying his best not to rip it too much.

It’s a photo album. The professional, expensive leather kind. The colour is a shiny, deep brown. Kyungsoo runs his fingers along the smooth material. “Pictures?” he murmurs. “What kinds?”

“Take a look,” Jongin says.

There isn’t anything Kyungsoo is expecting to see. Jongin, he knows, photographs cities and streets and the smallest corners of the world and compiles them into books. But when Kyungsoo pulls the cover back, he is met with his own face.

In the opening picture, Kyungsoo is slouched on Jongin’s bed. The shadows are heavy around his figure, blanket curled over his legs. Soft, white light from the television streaks across his face. His eyes are wide in the photo, eyebrows a little creased in concentration. The caption at the bottom reads:  _Hyung hating action movies_.

He flips the next page, and then the next. Every picture is of him. Kyungsoo in Jongin’s apartment. Kyungsoo in his own apartment. Kyungsoo sitting across from Jongin in a coffee shop. Kyungsoo hunched over his laptop. Kyungsoo smiling. Kyungsoo not smiling.

Most of them are candid. The ones that aren’t have Kyungsoo’s lips parted, caught off guard.

“When did you even…”

Had he forgotten that Jongin was photographing him? Or had he just never noticed?

Kyungsoo stops at one photograph of himself sitting at Jongin’s piano. He turns the page. Plastered to the back is a final photograph with no caption.

Kyungsoo in a cable car. His cheeks, even in the dark, are flushed red. He looks like he is mid-sentence, and whatever words are sitting on his lips, there is some strange life clinging to all the lines of his face as he speaks.

It’s unfamiliar, almost—different than the face Kyungsoo sees in the mirror every morning. This Kyungsoo, painted in the colours of Seoul, is a different Kyungsoo.

“We spoke once about how home is hard to photograph. I’ve always found it hard. But this is the best shot of it,” Jongin taps the album. He isn’t staring at Kyungsoo, he is staring at the Kyungsoo in the photograph. “It’s your expression. The city is lighted up in your eyes. You make it look all so beautiful.”

Kyungsoo curls his fingers. “Why are you showing me this?” he asks.

Jongin’s eyes are glazed over like glass, not with tears but with the translucent remains of Kyungsoo’s memories. The details drift, diluted, in Jongin’s black pupils.

“I wasn’t going to do anything with them at first,” Jongin says. “They were just pictures. I take pictures of everyone and everything.”

If Kyungsoo tries, hard, he can remember things like the lurching motion of the cable car and the fleece lining of his sweater pockets where his hands had been stuffed. Peering through the glass in Jongin’s eyes is as if staring through a window with thin curtains. Light seeps through, but you can’t see beyond that.

“But then suddenly, I had so many. I had hundreds of shots of you and I couldn’t delete them. I couldn’t stop staring at them,” Jongin tells him. “So I did what I always do. I made a photobook.”

Kyungsoo tries to make sense of the picture, as though there are secrets hidden in the shadows of the photograph. “Jongin. I don’t know—“

“I let you wilt away, didn’t I?” Jongin’s voice is soft and thin, like the tea going cold between them. He reaches into his pocket, and unfurls his closed fist. Inside, is a single, white flower petal. It looks like a daisy.

The photo album slips from Kyungsoo’s fingers. The memories appear before him, again as wispy and ephemeral as smoke. Had he too coughed daisies back then? Had his flower also been as sad as Jongin’s?

Jongin lets the petal fall onto the table. It tumbles delicately, as if it were a snowflake. Except, of course, the petal doesn’t melt away.

“Don’t let me wilt, hyung.”

 

-

 

// June 2017. boseong.

Kyungsoo hears the shutter click. The sound is small but so clear, distinct, nipping his eardrum. He cuts his eyes back towards Jongin, who lowers his camera into his lap. It’s still early in the afternoon. Right about now, Kyungsoo would be taking a walk. Maybe writing. Maybe helping out with a tour group.

Instead, Jongin had walked into the tea house. He’d told Kyungsoo’s aunt that he was a friend of Kyungsoo’s and so his aunt had promptly called him out from the back storage room.

And now, this.

“Why are you still doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“That. Taking pictures of me.” Kyungsoo leans back into his chair.

“Do you not like it?” Jongin’s fingers fiddle with the strap on the camera.

Kyungsoo shakes his head. “It’s not that I don’t like it.” A few customers walk in and the shop bell tinkles. The warm air floats in thickly, grazing Kyungsoo’s arms. He sighs. “But you’re still sick. You can’t keep this up.”

Kyungsoo had never thought Jongin would follow him out of the city. Now, Kyungsoo is simply concerned for him. Jongin is getting paler and thinner, playing a game he can’t win.

 _Write me letters_ , Kyungsoo had told him once.  _Write me letters that you won’t send. Like you did with your sister and with that other guy. Get it out of your system._

 _But hyung,_ was Jongin’s reply.  _Those are fake worlds. And in this world, I want you to exist._

“—soo, hyung?”

“Huh?” Kyungsoo pulls himself back. His head doesn’t hurt, but it feels cloudy.

“Your memories of me,” Jongin says. “Do you still have them?”

Azaleas, Kyungsoo recalls suddenly. Those had been the flowers he had coughed when he was sick. He doesn’t know why he is thinking about them, or why Jongin’s eyes are making him think about them.

“I do,” Kyungsoo says. Azaleas, azaleas—

It’s a new path of thought. Kyungsoo tries to follow it but as always, it dies out almost as quickly as it had come.

“But it’s… I can’t explain it.” He splays his hands out on the table, counting his fingers and then re-counting them. “It’s like… holding an empty shell. Everything is intact but the deeper stuff is gone, I—“

The cure is to forget.

But this is worse than forgetting, Kyungsoo realizes. The remains of the past dangle tantalizingly close to his consciousness—the illusion that it’s all within his grasp, but it isn’t. Just a little closer, just a little closer—

“I’m sorry. You’re stubborn so you can’t give up. But I’m telling you to or else you are going to die,” Kyungsoo says evenly. He keeps staring down at his fingers. “Just get the surgery. For your sake. And mine.”

“Do you remember what you said to me in my apartment? Before your own surgery,” Jongin asks. Kyungsoo’s spine runs down with a shiver.

“Of course I don’t.”

“You said you wouldn’t change a thing, if you could do it all over again.”

“I have no memory of this so you could be lying to me.”

“But do you think I’m lying?” asks Jongin.

Kyungsoo exhales lightly through his nose. “No,” he replies, the word soft, at the edges of his breath. Out in the fields, people are crouched along the rows. It’s getting busy now because the sky has cleared up and the weather is perfect. Not warm, not cold.

“You can’t fix me, Jongin,” he says again. “You can’t give me back memories.”

The hills dip and curve. They seem to go on forever, boundless.

“I won’t try, then,” Jongin says. He grips his camera, hand twisting the lens back and forth. Kyungsoo stares back, into its eye, and watches the shutter click. He can see his reflection.

“I’ll just give you new ones, hyung.”

Jongin smiles. It’s small, lacking mirth perhaps, but it reminds Kyungsoo of the smile Jongin had given him as he had introduced himself, that first time at the art show. This smile filters back to Kyungsoo the way the azaleas had—abrupt and neither familiar nor foreign. A smile with promise.

This is what you should believe: this is where they begin.

 

 

// end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title is taken from the song Crosses by Jose Gonzalez. originally this story was supposed to take place more in europe but i scrapped that. however, in the beginning there are some references to spanish art. notably [this](https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/online-gallery/on-line-gallery/obra/eugenia-martinez-vallejo-ldquothe-monsterrdquo-dressed) painting.
> 
> thank you for reading x


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